Around here, it’s dark when I get home regardless whether it’s standard time or saving time.
Is anyone giving odds that the House will pass a bill forbidding DST, making standard time the rule year-round?
This may be a moot point now that it’s a nationwide issue, but I recall when this was proposed just for FL by (I think) Marco Rubio. Many in our office were all atizzy because we’re aligned with the stock market and “ohmagosh, if we’re not on the same time as NY we’ll have to get up earlier!”, etc, etc, Obviously FL wants more available daylight because of tourism and the biggest reason why this didn’t happen here years ago is that it’s in the State constitution or something that we can opt out of changing the clocks but only if we go to year round standard time. Anyone else heard something like that in their own state?
That’s because of federal law: Uniform Time Act
The law does not require all states observe DST, but it does put forth the procedures for states that do observe DST, and pre-empted all state laws that differ from the federal timelines.
I’d say less than 5% chance the House will pass the bill this year. It only passed the Senate through a fluke, it’s gotten a lot more contentious now that people are paying attention, and it’s an election year. They may pass something along the lines of requiring a study of the idea, but it’s more likely they’ll just let it quietly die in committee.
I didn’t see the article cited, but typically unanimous consent votes are used for almost everything. The government has grown so large that it would literally be impossible to run such a large federal government if every bill came to the floor for debate with senators waxing poetic.
So the overwhelming amount of non-controversial stuff is passed this way. It has also becomes an informal tradition that during speechifying time, allowed because every Senator wants to get on TV and the internet making a speech for him or herself, that the Senator will ask for unanimous consent that his pet project passes. However in such cases, it is also customary and courteous to allow notice so that some other Senator can be on the floor to object and the first Senator gets to tell his supports that he introduced a bill and moved its passage. It is pure show.
It seems that what happened in this case is when Senator Rubio gave the customary message to the Senate that he planned to do this, Sen. Wicker was the Senator told to show up so he could object. His flight was delayed and Rubio nonetheless held off out of custom to the next day to allow Wicker to be there to object.
However, due to some oversight, nobody really told Wicker what he was there for whether it was that or another bill and he personally doesn’t think permanent DST is a big deal and it turns out that neither he nor anyone else on the floor objected, so the bill passed. Sinema was presiding and actually smiled when it passed.
So this was just a quirk. The articles talking of impending permanent DST are not recognizing that there is no real unanimous consent in the Senate for this.
XKCD offers insight into DST:
I do not believe that is a reference to DST. He is talking about ancient Greek and Roman hours.
To address the thread title, in the three months since the bill passed the Senate, the House has done absolutely nothing with it.
It’s still relevant to the discussion, though. Before clocks and watches came into widespread use, I’m sure there were arguments over the mechanical regularization of time, just as in the 1800s there were those who objected to the establishment of time zones, and present day debates over DST.
I’ve been noticing that.
Five months later and the House recessed for the entire month of August, the permanent DST bill has yet to so much as have a hearing.
Don’t think this one’s gonna go the distance. . .
Maybe they think they can sunset it.
Did you really expect it to?
I see what you did there.