Count Cockburn among the many skeptics of daylight savings time. One minute he’s setting his alarm for his usual wakeup call of 1 p.m., the next he’s being jolted out of a deep REM cycle at what should be the ungodly hour of noon.
Thankfully Cockburn and the many other DST detesters out there have found a champion in Marco Rubio. The Florida senator recently introduced the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Savings Time permanent nationwide (right now only Arizona and Hawaii don’t observe). That would mean no more setting back the clocks in November only to jump them ahead in March, no more of those sudden and surprising and sunny springtime evenings.
The Senate earlier this week passed Rubio’s legislation with bipartisan support, putting an end to decades of failure by the upper chamber to permanently extend daylight savings. Observers surmised it was Rubio’s shrewd timing — he introduced the bill just before we lost an hour of sleep — that netted him the win. (And they call Trump a shameless panderer!)
Rubio’s office lists several supposed benefits of forever DST, including fewer car crashes and robberies and reduced energy usage. That’s good news, though other lawmakers have expressed concerns. Among them is Senator Roger Wicker, last seen supporting a no-fly zone in Ukraine, who is considerably more cautious when it comes to the winding of his clocks. “It’s great for Florida. They’re in the right longitude and the right latitude,” Wicker said. “There’s kids in Minnesota and Nebraska and Montana that are going to catch the school bus in the pitch dark, and I worry about that.”
Cockburn begrudgingly admits that Wicker has a point. Anyone who’s ever crunched out to his car on a dark New England morning and scraped the ice off of the windshield in the wan glow of the headlights knows there’s a reason behind that November shift. And while Rubio’s bill has attained rare bipartisan support, Cockburn can’t help but think of an old political axiom: whenever Republicans and Democrats come together to do anything, the rest of us get shafted.
That doesn’t mean daylight savings time is, say, the war in Iraq, but it does mean skeptics like Wicker are worth listening to. As for the Sunshine Protection Act, it will next have to pass the House of Representatives, which hasn’t indicated yet whether it will take it up.
