As much as we complain about Congress, believe it or not, it looks like they might finally do something right!

This week, the Senate unanimously passed a bill to keep Daylight-Saving Time year-round instead of switching back and forth like we’ve done forever.

But wouldn’t you know it, I guess there exists a fringe group of people who are against the idea.

According to a columnist at Business Insider,

Marco Rubio leads a group of senators who want to impose daylight-saving time all year.
We tried this in the 1970s and quickly went back to the old clock-changing policy.
It turns out, people hate it when the sun doesn’t rise until 9am.

I don’t just mean that having an extra hour of sunlight in the evening will be great — the sun will set in Manhattan at 7:02 pm on Sunday, late enough to enjoy a C-V-D-safe outdoor dinner in the twilight — but the practice of changing our clocks back and forth each year is itself great.

Now I want to single out a few things that this person said in the article.

Marco Rubio wants to make you wake up in the dark.

No, that’s not what he “wants”. It will be a natural result of the matter, but that’s not what he “wants”. Also, notice how she’s singling Marco Rubio out on this because it’s his bill. But guess what? EVERY single Senator approved this bill. It was unanimous.

A bipartisan group of senators wants to take the good status-quo time policy away from us and instead install all-year daylight-saving time. 

Yeah, it was a bipartisan group, but the easiest way to refer to this is the entire Senate.

We don’t need to theorize how people would feel about this. Year-round DST is a policy the US already tried once, during the 1970s oil crisis, on the theory that it would save energy. The policy started in January 1974 for what was supposed to be a two-year experiment.

So, how did that go? I’ll give you one clue: the experiment did not end up running for two years.

We tried year-round daylight saving in the 1970s and people haaaaaaated it

Less than nine months after the US adopted year-round daylight saving, the House voted 383 to 16 to repeal it. 383 to 16! President Gerald  Ford signed the law to bring back standard time in October 1974, just in time to save America from another winter of miserable pre-dawn wake ups.

The thing is that we live in a much different world than we did in the 70s. Things are different now.

Standard time all year is bad, too

Okay, so what if instead of leaving our clocks set forward all year, we kept them rolled back? This wouldn’t force more people to wake up before dawn, but it would lead to the extensive waste of daylight hours as the sun would rise hours before people are likely to wake up in the middle of summer.

It already does rise before people are likely to wake up in the middle of the summer. Most people wake up after 7:00am and the sun is up before then.

Personally, I am in favor of the change, as are most Americans.