Congress Moves Toward Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent

This die-hard morning girl (and history) have concerns.

If you’d asked 30-year-old me whether I wanted an extra hour of daylight after work in the winter, I would’ve tackled you to the ground trying to vote yes twice. Patio dinners! Actual, visible sunshine after a day chained to a desk! Sunset strolls in cute boots and a furry vest! What sort of psychopath would want anything else?

[*adds psychopath to resume*]

Somewhere along the line, I transformed into the kind of person who wakes up before 5:00 a.m. every day without an alarm. I don’t know exactly how this happened. Or why. Or when. I assume sometime between menopause and my first passionate, unsolicited opinion about mulch. All I know is that the sun hasn’t beaten me up in years. Drinking my third cup of coffee in the dark is all I know anymore.

Now Congress is actually taking steps to make daylight saving time (DST) permanent. If the Sunshine Protection Act passes, come December, the sun wouldn’t peek over the horizon until nearly 9:00 a.m. in some parts of the country. Nine o’clock. Millions of Americans would commute in the pitch dark. School children across the country would need flashlights to find their bus stops. My morning walk would basically become my mid-afternoon walk.

The pitch: No more driving home from work in the dark. No more miserable semi-annual wrestling matches with the microwave. No more complicated mental math to try to explain your bad mood. (“Wait, the clock says it’s three but we just fell back so technically it’s four OMG now it all makes sense.”) Just bright, sunny evenings all year long. It’s called the Sunshine Protection Act, for crying out loud. What could be more wholesome, more harmless?

The thing is, we’ve already tried this little experiment. It did not go well. In January 1974, during the energy crisis, Congress put the entire country on permanent DST. At first, Americans loved the idea. Polls showed nearly 80% support. Backyard barbecues without sweating through your underwear? An after-dinner pickleball match at a temperature below the surface of the sun? Watching a sunset without SPF 50 and an electrolyte drink? Say less.

Then winter showed up.

As it happened, parents did not enjoy waking their children in what felt like the middle of the night and sending them off to school in the cloak of darkness. Some literally wrapped their kids in reflective tape just so drivers could see them on the streets and at bus stops.

Tragically, that particular trick didn’t always work. During the first weeks of the experiment, several children were struck and killed by cars in the pre-dawn darkness. Whether permanent daylight saving time was to blame is still debated by researchers—but politically, the damage was done. Public opinion flipped and Congress repealed the law before the two-year trial was even halfway over.

It turned out as much as people wanted long stretches of sunlight in the evening, they really didn’t want long stretches of darkness in the morning.

I think sometimes folks forget that part. (One gal on X actually wrote, “Kids having longer time in the evening to spend playing after doing homework is a good thing.” Y’all realize nobody’s handing out extra hours here, right?)

The reality is, there was (and is) no have-it-all option. Essentially, there are three mediocre ones: make the switch to permanent daylight saving, get rid of daylight saving altogether—yes, permanent standard time, meaning shorter days even in summer—or stick with the hybrid system we’ve got now. None is perfect. Patio restaurant owners, retailers, athletes, commuters, and happy‑hour enthusiasts are pounding on door number one. I get the argument; when 5 p.m. looks and feels like bedtime, the days can start to resemble a sad parade of grind, sleep, repeat.

Parents, teachers, farmers, delivery drivers, pediatricians, and sleep scientists are all clinging to door number two. Morning sunlight is what sets your body’s internal clock. That means better sleep. Better mood. Fewer people stumbling through the day like caffeinated raccoons. Sure, your brain tells you it wants endless daylight. It also tells you it wants to lie on the couch and eat Doritos sometimes. Neither is great for you.

Door number three always felt like the worst of both worlds. I can’t believe I’m even typing this, but now I think it might be a pretty decent compromise. Forget my pathetic little first-world problem about having to wait a few hours to take my morning walk. Imagine trying to drag a ninth grader out of bed when it still looks like 2 a.m. outside. It already takes an iron will and solid hostage negotiating skills to get a teenager to first period. Sure, we have a few confusing days in March and November; in exchange we get late sunsets in summer when we’re actually outside enjoying them, and brighter winter mornings just when we’re trying to convince our circadian rhythms that life is worth living. It could be worse. I certainly don’t want standard time year round.

SERIOUSLY THO.

While we might love springing forward for hedonistic reasons, DST wasn’t created so we could sip rosé at 8:30 p.m. It was adopted during World War I (and again in World War II) as an energy-saving measure, based on the theory that more evening daylight meant less artificial lighting and lower fuel use. Whether it actually worked is… still a matter of debate. But it’s stuck around, well, mostly because changing it requires a literal act of Congress.

For years, I assumed the only people fighting against DST were vampires and the sort of neighbors who call the HOA because your garbage can was visible for eleven minutes too long. Now I’m reading circadian rhythm research. Life comes at you fast.

Basically me at this point.

The House actually just overwhelmingly passed the Sunshine Protection Act (308-117); from here it goes to the Senate, where its prospects of passing are entirely up in the air. Hilariously, when a nearly identical bill went through the Senate back in 2022, it passed unanimously—and then died in the House, which couldn’t be bothered to vote on it. For once, I find myself rooting for Congress to keep doing what Congress does best: absolutely nothing.

Godspeed, gridlock. Don’t let me down now.

***I write about vaccines, assassination plots, socialism, surveillance, stolen elections, Islamification, fraud, pharma, censorship, climate change, chlorine dioxide, and high profile political murders, and somehow I feel like this is the piece that’s going to get me hate mail. Remember, it’s just my opinion—and you’re welcome to share yours! :)

***About THE SPEECH***

If you want to know how nervous the media was about Trump’s address to the nation last night, NBC, ABC, and CNN preemptively refused to run it at all. This morning, they’re here to tell you that you missed nothing. “Old grievances.” “Rehashed.” “Common refrain.” “Exaggerated claims.” “Wild and baseless.” “Debunked conspiracies.”

To be fair, it wasn’t Trump’s most charismatic presentation. We didn’t get the perp walks and sealed indictments we were hoping for. And until I have time to dig into the newly declassed documents at the heart of it, I can’t honestly say if it was a game-changer or a 35-minute ad for the SAVE act.

But there were a few nuggets worth flagging: an FBI official allegedly wrote in her own words that she was running a shadow government to bury Chinese election interference. An NSA analyst admitted to “deliberately massaging” the president’s daily briefings to scrub any mention of election tampering. And the Obama-Biden transition team apparently left some burn bags—actual document destruction—behind that somebody forgot to burn. Oops.

So not quite a fireworks finale at this point—maybe more like a smoke bomb—but hardly “nothing to see here” either, providing POTUS can produce the receipts. (The White House website literally crashed under the traffic after the doc dump was announced.) Stay tuned. :)