Daylight saving time bill stalls again in US Senate [View all]

Source: msn/Reuters

12h


WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Senate briefly took up a long-stalled effort on Tuesday to make daylight saving time permanent and end the twice-yearly practice of switching clocks, but again failed to reach consensus.

Senator Rick Scott, a Republican, and other senators went to the floor to push for passage of the bill first unanimously approved in March 2022, but Senator Tom Cotton said he would oppose any effort to fast-track the bill. "The American people love having an extra hour of sunlight," Scott said.

Congress has debated the issue for years. It held a legislative hearing earlier this year and won support from President Donald Trump for the change, but does not appear any closer to agreement. Standard time resumes on Sunday in the United States. Year-round daylight saving time was used during World War Two and enacted again in 1974 in a bid to reduce energy use because of an oil embargo, but was unpopular and was repealed later that year.

Cotton said that the bill's proponents are pushing Congress to repeat a prior mistake that would create absurdly late winter sunrises and force children to go to school in darkness in much of the country. The legislation would let states choose which time they want to remain on, but some worry that would lead to a patchwork of time zones across the country.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/daylight-saving-time-bill-stalls-again-in-us-senate/ar-AA1PnpLu

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Good. This will probably be the first and only time I agree with Cotton-head.

I was a victim of the last time they started daylight savings in January over 50 years ago, and having to go to school with a flashlight because the neighborhood lighting was so poor. The northern-most tier of states used to having longer nights in winter (but longer days in summer) have lighting infrastructure in place to deal with that. But further south within the CONUS, in the most densely populated urban areas where children don't have the luxury of a school bus showing up in front of their door, and have to walk and/or take public transit to school, the level of lighting needed has been non-existent. And *finally*, medical professionals are coming out with the research about the negative physical impact of year-round daylight savings time versus standard time or even the time changes. IMHO, they need to go back to the "April/October" because that previous switch had the changes happening closer to the equinox weeks.