Your clocks fall back on November 1st. Again. And they’re doing it even though Congress supposedly already fixed this.
Back in July, the House passed the Sunshine Protection Act 308-117, with Trump’s backing, to stop the twice-a-year clock flip for good. A real vote, on the record, with numbers most bills in Washington would kill for. Then it went to the Senate Commerce Committee. And it’s been sitting there since.
Here’s why. The Senate came back from recess on September 14th with roughly fourteen working days before it leaves again, and it spent September 15th on a cloture vote for the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, a crypto regulation bill. That’s the calendar. There’s essentially no floor time left for clocks before November 1st arrives and makes the whole debate moot for another year.
Even if there were time, there’s Tom Cotton. He’s said outright he’ll filibuster the bill and won’t grant unanimous consent, which means it needs sixty votes it doesn’t obviously have. Asked whether it can actually get there, Majority Leader Thune’s answer was “remains to be seen.” That’s the Senate’s own leader, shrugging about his own chamber’s bill.
I don’t say this about much in Congress, but this one should have been easy. This isn’t guns or taxes or abortion, where people genuinely disagree on the substance. Polling on ending the clock switch has run lopsided for years. One chamber already did the hard part and produced an actual recorded vote. The other chamber has a scheduling problem and one senator with a grudge, and that’s apparently enough to run out the clock, no pun intended, on something almost everyone claims to want.
I’ve said before that regulation doesn’t bother me when it’s solving a real problem, and it bothers me a lot when it’s theater dressed up as policy. This is the same test, pointed at inaction instead. Nobody’s grandstanding on a Senate floor about why we need to keep changing clocks twice a year. Nobody has to. All it takes is a crowded calendar and one guy blocking unanimous consent, and a fix that already passed a whole chamber of Congress just quietly doesn’t happen. That’s not gridlock in the dramatic sense. It’s just a body that can’t be bothered to make time for the one thing on its plate people actually agree on.
So on November 1st, set your clocks back like you have every year of your life, for a fix that technically already passed a chamber of Congress months ago. Nothing about that sentence should make sense, and yet here we are.
My two cents: Congress can push a bill through an entire chamber with a real bipartisan vote and still lose to a scheduling conflict. That’s not gridlock. That’s just Tuesday.