Permanent daylight saving time impacts are moving from theory to pressure point in Washington, where the House passed the Sunshine Protection Act last week but The Senate may not have enough support to finish the job. John Thune said it wasn’t clear whether the bill could reach the 60 votes needed, and that math is now the difference between a vote and a stall.
John Thune and the 60 votes
Thune told reporters last week that there was interest on his side, but split views inside Senate Republicans make the count hard to read. “There's a lot of interest in it from members on our side. Some for, some against.”
Jerry Moran put the practical stakes in plain terms. He said children could be going to school and walking to the bus in the dark, and added, “My best guess is there aren't votes to pass it.”
Sunshine Protection Act split
The Sunshine Protection Act would stop the twice-yearly clock change that now makes people lose an hour in the spring and gain it back in the fall. President Donald Trump has advocated for years to make daylight saving time permanent, and Vern Buchanan introduced the House-passed bill.
Buchanan argued on the House floor that the extra hour matters for business. “That additional hour a day, at least in Florida but across the country, makes a big difference in terms of doing business.”
The opposition inside Senate Republicans is not just procedural. Tom Cotton of Arkansas has opposed scrapping standard time, and John Boozman said he shared Cotton’s view. “It's hard to get things done when you have positions that split everybody,” Boozman said. “The easiest thing to do is leave them alone.”
119th Congress time pressure
The bill sits in the 119th Congress with just over three months until the midterm elections. The Senate will be largely out of session for two of those months, which leaves a narrow window for a floor vote before the calendar tightens again.
John Hoeven said the measure “has a chance to pass,” but the count and the schedule are moving in opposite directions. Congress has done this before: during the global oil crisis of the 1970s it passed a similar change, then reversed it after permanent daylight saving became deeply unpopular with most Americans. Whether the Sunshine Protection Act can reach 60 Senate votes before time runs out is still the real test.
