The US House voted Tuesday to pass a measure to enact year-round Daylight Saving Time across the country, springing Congress forward into an issue that has long stumped lawmakers and spurred impassioned pleas by parents, farmers and others with sharply divergent views.
It will now head to the Senate for approval before going to the president for his signature — though its chances in the upper chamber remain unclear.
I read somewhere that the Senate wants it to be Standard instead of DST, which I agree would wind up being better for most locations (not all). So they’ll probably fight over it and nothing will happen. We’ll see. At this point I just want to stop having to change the damn clocks.
I used to favor permanent DST because I’m not a morning person, but I realize most people aren’t night-owls like me, and by now there’s been a lot of evidence presented that it’s healthier to be in sync with sunlight and more important to get good sleep, especially for kids. Of course a lot of this also depends on which side of your time zone you live on.
Between the two positions, for a long time I favored permanent half-DST, which is setting clocks halfway between so the offset isn’t that bad for health and both sides of the standard vs DST debate could live with it. There was even a bill proposed to do that, but I recently read an article listing a few drawbacks to being on the half-hour compared to most other countries–mostly that it would be “confusing” which isn’t that strong of an argument IMO. I still think this would be a good solution if a bunch of other countries also did it. A few countries already are offset a half-hour from us and no one complains because they’re not major economic forces.