Daylight Saving Time possibly permanent 11/2023

Once again, Americans will set their clocks forward an hour this Sunday — teeing up more evening sunshine but also a few days of confused circadian rhythms, missed appointments and groggy mornings from coast to coast.

And once again, the lawmaker dubbed the “Sun King” is vowing that this can be the year that Congress ends the nation’s much-maligned, twice-yearly time changes.

“Americans want more sunshine in the chilly, winter months, and Congress can deliver that to them,” said Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who got the Sun King nickname after he passed legislation extending daylight saving time in 1985, and again in 2005. Now, Markey is one of the sponsors of a bipartisan bill that would allow states to lock in permanent daylight saving time, enabling them to “spring forward” one final time and never “fall back” again.

The Democrat from Massachusetts acknowledged in an interview that the bill, known as the Sunshine Protection Act and spearheaded by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), faces an uphill battle in Congress this year — but he argues that persistence had changed the nation’s time code before and could do so again.

“My opinion is, honestly, the sun doesn’t have any enemies,” Markey said, adding that moving the clocks forward permanently would enable hundreds of millions of people to enjoy more sunshine later in the day for outdoor activities, shopping and dining.

That prognosis may be on the bright side given Congress’s decades-long fight over daylight saving time — whom it helps or hurts, when it should start and whether the nation should be changing its clocks at all. The battle reached a crescendo last year, when the Senate surprisingly passed the Sunshine Protection Act in a unanimous vote in March. But the bill died in the House amid questions over whether year-round daylight saving time was actually safe or healthy, and also galvanized new energy around what many had seen as a quixotic issue.

It’s led to more spending on lobbyists, for instance, from so-called Big Sleep, the sleep medicine doctors who warn that too much daylight would disrupt our circadian rhythms, and who seek the restoration of permanent standard time — the idea that we should never “spring forward” at all.

“Since the events in Congress last spring around daylight saving time, we have met with the offices of dozens of legislators to discuss restoring permanent standard time, with most of them being open and interested in the issue,” Melissa Clark of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine wrote in an email................

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