U.S. Senate passes a bill calling for year-round daylight saving time

The clocks moved forward an hour Sunday, and under a bill passed unanimously by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday this time they would never go back.

The so-called Sunshine Protection Act, calling for year-round daylight saving time, introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and bipartisan cosponsors, now goes to the House. It is unclear when the House might act, said Rep. Brendan Boyle (D., Pa.), who has sponsored a similar bill, “but the idea definitely has legs.”

“The speed with which the Senate acted on this caught us by surprise,” he said. “They rarely are able to get unanimous consent.”

The bill would eliminate a contentious century-old ritual of moving time forward an hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall. “Changing our clocks twice a year is a mistake, and it has real costs,” said Boyle.

The more divisive issue is whether to go all-standard or all-DST, and Boyle said that could take a while to study and resolve. He said he is pro-DST, but as someone married to a schoolteacher who gets up at 5 a.m., “I understand there’s arguments on the other side.”

» READ MORE: Seven things to know as the clocks go forward

Florida, which is split into two time zones, and Delaware are among the 18 states whose legislatures have passed laws for year-round DST. However, they require a change in federal law to take effect.

While the concept is popular among youth sports leagues and people who prefer not to eat dinner after nightfall, the bill is almost certain to generate opposition from sleep-health activists, who contend daylight saving time is disruptive to body rhythms.

Educators also are likely to balk. On the shortest day of the year, at the winter solstice, the sun wouldn’t wouldn’t rise until 8:19 a.m. in Philadelphia, as late as 8:23 the first week in January, and after 8 every morning from Nov. 29 through Feb. 9.

» READ MORE: DST worsens our "social jet lag," experts say

When the nation test-drove year-round daylight in late 1973 into 1974 during an energy crisis, the National School Boards Association called for an immediate end because school buses were picking up pupils and driving in darkness on their morning routes. The experiment was supposed to last two years; it was halted in 10 months.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has advocated for year-round standard time, saying that moving the clocks forward presented “significant public health and safety risks,” from sleep deprivation.

But those late-arriving sunsets are mighty popular among the citizenry, not to mention among restaurants with outdoor seating and makers of barbecue grills.

DST was first tried in the United States in 1918, when Congress created time zones and daylight saving time. Its debut on March 31 of that year had some hiccups. That happened to be Easter Sunday, and some religious leaders complained it cast shadows on sunrise services.

Until 1966, when Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, DST was basically a local option.

The public is about evenly split between those who favor year-round standard time and those who would prefer DST, according to polling. But the idea of ending the time-changing tradition has widespread support.

“It’s time we stop changing our clocks,” Rep. Frank Pallone (D., N.J.), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said at a hearing last week.

He said he has “yet to decide” whether he wants to go forward or backward, but “I believe that any justifications for springing forward and falling back are either outdated or are outweighed by the serious health and economic impacts we now know are associated with the time changes.”

Staff writer Jonathan Tamari contributed to this article.