Donald Trump spent part of his Sunday urging the Senate to vote for a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent — putting an end to what he called the “ridiculous” and “disruptive” practice of resetting clocks twice per year.
“The Senate must vote on the NO MORE CHANGING THE CLOCKS ACT as soon as possible. More sun later in the day is better (including for fighting crime!), but, even more importantly, NO MORE RIDICULOUSLY CHANGING CLOCKS AND WATCHES TWICE YEARLY, with all of the disruption and chaos it causes. FINALLY, GET IT DONE!!!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Proponents say the changing clocks will provide more sunlight later in the day; however, that means less light in the morning when children head to school.
But the bill championed by Trump twice in one week seems doomed in the Senate, at least for now, as the chamber stares down the midterms with a number of priorities still at hand.
The push to eliminate the biannual resetting of clocks isn’t new. Congress once passed a law permanently setting clocks back by an hour, and the result was unpopular at the time, causing the law to be repealed less than a year after it took effect in 1974. Under permanent daylight saving time, the sun’s highest point would fall around 1:00 p.m., while sunrise would occur much later during the winter in some states and regions.
For that reason, Senate Majority Leader John Thune has warned that members of both parties oppose the bill in the upper chamber, including himself. Thune voted against the bill in committee and hasn’t scheduled a floor vote, meaning that the legislation passed by the House earlier this year remains in limbo.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump from increasing calls to end the practice of “spring forward” and “fall back.”
This isn’t the first issue on which Thune has bucked the president and his opposition comes as the Senate is separately ignoring Trump’s calls to pass the SAVE America Act, a piece of voter ID legislation.
The Hill reported that Senate GOP sources estimated the bill to end changing clocks would take up several weeks of the upper chamber’s time were it to be brought to the floor, and that Republicans were unsure of its passage. But the legislation hasn’t undergone a formal whipping of the votes by either party in the Senate, and it passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support. In 2022, the Senate passed a bill to make the change permanent via unanimous consent — but at least one GOP senator has said that he’d halt that from occurring once more. Others have been cagey about their views on the subject.
One Republican who hasn’t been shy about his opposition to the bill is Sen. Tom Cotton, who represents a Southern state and trashed the idea in a recent interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
“If you live in Bentonville, Ark., the sun wouldn’t come up in the depths of winter until well after 8 o’clock, maybe even 8:30,” said Cotton. “There are places throughout the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states that wouldn’t see the sun until 9, 9:30, almost 10 o’clock in some cases. That would be very dangerous, especially for kids who are walking to school, biking to school, being left at bus stops.”
Two states, Hawaii and Arizona, already refuse to participate in daylight saving time.
Dozens of countries do besides the U.S., but neighboring Mexico abandoned it — mostly — in 2022. Canada and much of Europe practice setting the clocks back, but most of Africa and Asia do not. Legislation to do away with the changing of the clocks was proposed in the European Union in 2018, but stalled before final passage and implementation.
The New York Times reports that 19 states have passed efforts to make the time change permanent, though those laws are superseded by federal policy.
If nothing else, the main reason for the bill’s unlikely future in the Senate may be Trump’s fraying relationship with Thune and the Senate GOP caucus. A “peacemaking” meeting on Capitol Hill between Trump and members of the Senate GOP was described as tense and combative at times, and the president has not seen his relationship improve with the two GOP senators he forced out of office, Bill Cassidy and John Cornyn.
His support for their primary opponents similarly damaged Trump’s ties with Thune, and the caucus has grown frustrated with the White House over its repeated support for issues and policy pushes that are viewed as widely unpopular, such as money for Trump’s ballroom or a fund that would reward January 6 rioters.
For now, the legislation seems stuck. The Senate is now out on recess until September, leaving it low on a list of priorities for the chamber upon its return. Trump’s dream of seeing that bipartisan unity come to pass in the Senate may end up being the latest casualty of the divide increasingly eating away at Republican leadership.
