You got an extra hour of sleep Sunday, and Congress got an extra hour to ignore the one bill 308 House members already agreed on.
Clocks fell back at 2 a.m. on November 1, same as they have every first Sunday of November since 2007. Meanwhile the Sunshine Protection Act, which would stop all of this by locking in daylight saving time year-round, is sitting in the Senate Commerce Committee. The House passed it 308-117 on July 14. The Senate got it the next day and has done nothing with it since, as far as the record shows. I wrote about that vote when it happened, and the situation hasn’t moved an inch.
Here’s the part that should bother you. According to CBS News, the bill and everything else pending dies in early January when the new Congress is sworn in. Then the whole thing restarts: both chambers and the president, from zero. A bill that cleared the House by a margin of nearly three to one is about to expire from sheer neglect.
It isn’t even new. The Senate passed a version by unanimous consent in March 2022, which is about as easy as passing anything gets. The House sat on it, the session ended, and the bill vanished. Now the chambers have flipped roles. Same movie, different villain.
This time the holdup has a name. President Trump supports the bill and has publicly blamed Sen. Tom Cotton for stalling it, going so far as to post what he said was Cotton’s cell number and tell people to call. Cotton’s answer was that Congress already tried permanent daylight saving time once, and Americans bailed on it the moment they experienced “absurdly late sunrises in the winter.”
He has a point. That’s what makes this fun. Year-round daylight saving means December mornings where the sun doesn’t show up until well after you’ve started work, and plenty of people who say they hate changing the clocks would hate that more. The twice-a-year switch is annoying. A permanent switch has its own bill coming due.
But notice what’s happening. Nobody in the Senate is out there making that case in a hearing, with data, and then voting no. They’re just letting the clock run out. That’s the cheapest option in Washington: never be the person who decided anything. Take a stand, own the late sunrises, and the angry emails are yours. Do nothing, and the bill quietly dies with your fingerprints nowhere near it.
Meanwhile the next spring-forward is already on the calendar for March 14, 2027, and Hawaii and most of Arizona will keep smugly doing whatever they’ve done for decades. They figured this out by simply picking one and moving on.
I don’t much care whether we land on permanent daylight time or permanent standard time. I care that lawmakers who can find the time to pass 308-117 messaging votes can’t find the time for a committee hearing that decides it for real. Pick one. Vote it up or vote it down. Letting a popular bill die in a drawer is just cowardice with a procedural excuse.
My two cents: if you won’t fix the clocks, at least have the guts to say you chose to leave them broken.