Senate agrees sun should rise on Marco Rubio’s permanent daylight saving time bill

Marco Rubio.

The sun has risen, at last, on Sen. Marco Rubio’s bright idea to make daylight saving time permanent — at least in the Senate.

For the first time since Rubio proposed ending the nation’s fall-back, spring-forward pattern in 2018, the proposal won unanimous approval from the Senate chamber Tuesday by voice vote.

“This is an idea whose time has come,” Rubio said on the Senate floor, according to his office.

As has been his pattern in previous years, Rubio recorded a video message pushing the idea just before the nation lost an hour of sleep Sunday to “spring forward” into evenings with more daylight.

“Switching in and out of daylight savings time is outdated, and is only a source of annoyance and confusion,” he said in the video message.

Even though cell phones and digital clocks have mostly negated the need to move the time forward manually.

On the Senate floor, Rubio made his case, according to a release from his office.

“We don’t have to keep doing this stupidity anymore,” he said. “Why we would enshrine this in our laws and keep it for so long is beyond me.”

Rubio made his request as the Senate reconvened after lunch. And Politico reports that Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, presiding over the Senate, appeared to exclaim, “Oh, I love it.”

Ironically enough, Sinema’s state, which does not observe the time change custom, would be one of those that Rubio’s Sunshine Protection Act of 2021 would not affect.

If the House agrees, and President Joe Biden signs off on it, the clocks would be locked in place starting in 2023.

Rubio attributed the sudden success of his idea to good timing, anyway.

“No one was going to object,” Rubio said, according to his office. “You’ve got to find the right moment to hit the hole.”

Florida in 2018 passed legislation that would make springing forward permanent, but it would have to be adopted by federal statute to actually go into practice.

Nineteen other states — Alabama, Arkansas, California, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Montana, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming — have passed similar laws, resolutions or voter initiatives, according to Rubio’s office.

But having daylight saving time become permanent might not be so popular in practice.

It became a permanent thing in 1973 in a bid to reduce energy use because of an oil embargo and repealed a year later, Reuters reports.