Lankford again sponsors bill to make daylight saving permanent

Mar. 2—The annual ritual of the government stealing an hour of sleep would cease under the reintroduced Sunshine Protection Act.

A bipartisan group of senators, including Sen. James Lankford, R-OK, is sponsoring the act to make daylight saving time permanent, ending the practice of turning clocks one hour back every November.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, reintroduced the Sunshine Protection Act in the Senate on Tuesday. The bill unanimously passed the Senate March 2022, but months went by without any action in the House and a vote was not made before the midterm election deadline.

"The ritual of changing time twice a year is stupid," Rubio said. "Locking the clock has overwhelming bipartisan and popular support. This Congress, I hope that we can finally get this done."

Lankford said Oklahomans are tired of asking themselves why they have to change the clocks.

"Every mom of young children hates this time of year when alarm clocks change, but babies' clocks don't," Lankford said. "It is past time to get this bill to the President's desk so we can take the stress, headaches and annoying twice-a-year reset of the clocks out of our lives."

Benjamin Franklin first proposed the idea of aligning waking hours to daylight hours to save money on candles in a 1784 satirical letter to the editor of the Journal of Paris. In the letter, titled "An Economic Project", he said he got the idea when he woke up one day at 6 a.m. and saw his room was already filled with light.

"I consider that if I had not been awakened so early in the morning I should have slept six hours longer ... and in exchange have lived six hours the following night by candle-light; and the latter is a much more expensive light than the former," Franklin said. "Every morning, as soon as the sun rises, let all the bells in every church be set ringing; and if that is not sufficient, let cannons be fired in every street to wake the sluggards."

The United States officially adopted this line of thinking with the Standard Time Act of 1918 as a wartime measure to conserve energy resources.

Data from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine support the elimination of seasonal time changes in favor of a fixed, year-round time because of health and public safety-related consequences such as mood disorders and motor vehicle crashes. But the AASM' study concluded clocks should be permanently fixed to the standard time period between fall and spring because it aligns best with human circadian rhythm.

Farmers also prefer standard time because of animals' biological clocks, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. For example, if cows are used to being milked around 5 a.m., moving the clock forward forces them to get acclimated to getting milked sooner.

Still, both scientists and farmers prefer a permanent time over an impermanent one, and the Sunshine Protection Act would solve that.