No More Fall Back: House Now to Vote on Permanent Daylight Saving Time
By Ward ClarkIt's about time.
The House of Representatives is set now to try, once again, to get rid of a particular piece of timekeeping stupidity: The constant spring-ahead, fallback practice of Daylight-Saving Time (DST) and Standard Time. While I would have rather seen them try to make Standard permanent, it would be enough for them to just pick one and stay with it. In this bill, it seems they are going for permanent DST. Fine, fine. Just pick one.
The House of Representatives is set to vote next week on a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, according to a notice posted Thursday.
In May, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 48-1 in favor of the Sunshine Protection Act. The Senate unanimously passed the measure in March 2022, but the House never took up the measure in the face of opposition.
The proposal the House will consider next week would allow states to opt out.
Daylight saving time — putting the clocks forward one hour every summer — has been in place in nearly all of the United States since the 1960s.
States could opt out, it seems, by sticking with the current system. That's not the worst idea; these kinds of things have generally been the province of the several states anyway, and that's as it should be. Some states, like Arizona and Hawaii, have already opted out of DST and remain on Standard all year, although it's unclear what they would do in the event this new bill becomes law.
Here in the Great Land, while it would still be welcome, it honestly won't make that much difference. It's dark almost all day in the winter and light almost all night in the summer anyway, although right around the winter solstice, a permanent DST would have the sun coming up shortly before noon. That's OK, though. As I've always said, you don't have to be a little bit crazy to live in Alaska, but it sure doesn't hurt.
This isn't the first time Congress has tried to get this done.
This silliness was (most recently) put in place by the Uniform Time Act of 1966, amended by the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Not that having a nationwide standard for timekeeping is a bad idea - it's not - but the whole rationale of "saving" by pushing the clock ahead an hour is suspect. But fine, if having it light later in the evening saves energy, as the proponents of this claim, well, then a permanent DST will preserve that while eliminating that twice-a-year, spring-ahead fallback annoyance.
President Donald Trump has pushed for an end to the twice-annual clock-switching, saying in May that it was "time that people can stop worrying about the 'Clock,' not to mention all of the work and money that is spent on this ridiculous, twice-yearly production."
Hear, hear, Mr. President. This is a simple enough matter. It shouldn't distract Congress for more than a few minutes. Let's see if we can't get this done, so we can be spared this spring and fall nuisance. As I've been saying and writing for years, enough is enough.
This seems appropriate.
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