Battle over daylight saving time erupts as push to stop changing

Video Trump addresses Iran and permanent daylight saving time President Donald Trump speaks to reporters at the White House about Iran, falling oil prices, and making daylight saving time permanent.

The battle over Americans’ clocks reemerged in an unlikely way over the weekend, with President Donald Trump picking a fight with one of his top allies over the issue.

There have been many fights in Congress over the nearly two years that Trump has been in office for his second term that either ended in partisan victory or gloriously fizzled out, but one has quietly gone onto the shelf despite his pressure on Republicans to do something about it.

And that fight is over allowing states to voluntarily observe daylight saving time year-round to effectively do away with the twice-a-year ritual of changing clocks. It’s a popular issue with voters and the president, and there’s a bill that passed the House this summer to enact the change. But it’s a policy issue that has divided both sides of the aisle and ground to a halt in the upper chamber.

President Donald Trump wants to make daylight saving permanent, but a geographic coalition of northern versus southern states are in a heated debate over the merits of the change, which spells doom for the bill. (Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images; Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., has been one of the more vocal opponents of the bill, vowing to block any attempts to fast-track it on the floor. That resistance earned him a Truth Social post from Trump, who over the weekend shared his personal phone number in a bid to pressure the lawmaker to change his stance on daylight saving time.

"Almost everybody wants "The Sunshine Protection Act" to pass, except for Tom Cotton," Trump said. "To the Great People of Arkansas, please let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself."

Cotton responded, noting that Congress has tackled daylight saving time before, only to roll back the change shortly after.

"No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Saving Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter," Cotton said on X. "Arkansans don’t want their kids going to school in the pitch dark, and I’ll always put Arkansas first."

In the 1970s, lawmakers did enact year-round daylight saving time. But Americans rapidly soured on the change, especially parents whose children had to wait in the dark for the school bus. It was repealed about a year later.

And Cotton recently answered an off-the-cuff question from a fellow Republican during their weekly closed-door policy lunches, a source told Fox News Digital, where he made a similar case as his response to Trump. No one pushed back during the meeting.

The issue of daylight saving time, and supporting a permanent fix or sticking to the status quo are more geographical than political.

It’s, in part, mountainous and Western states versus coastal states. On one side of the spectrum are lawmakers like Sens. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and Patty Murray, D-Wash., who introduced a Senate version of the bill last year.

"Every year, more Americans grow more frustrated setting their clocks back and forth, and every winter folks in Washington state despair at the prospect of losing an hour of precious sunlight when we are forced off Daylight Saving Time," Murray said in a statement at the time.

Aerial view of downtown Bozeman, Montana at dusk. (iStock/DianeBentleyRaymond)

Lawmakers in landlocked states out West, like Sens. Steve Daines, R-Mont., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., warn that it would cause kids in their states to go to school in the dark.

"I can see where Florida likes it for tee times at certain times of the year, but it doesn’t work so well for moms and dads putting kids on buses when the sunrise in Western Montana wouldn’t be till 9:30 in the morning. It’s not going to work for us," Daines told CNN in July.

The most vital currency in the Senate is floor time. And lawmakers won’t have much floor time to spare when they return after the midterm elections in November. Though it’s popular, more pressing issues like the National Defense Authorization Act, supplemental funding for the war and a looming government funding battle will likely take precedence.

And Republican leaders acknowledge that it’s not as easy as a simple yes-or-no vote for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

"Depends where you're living in the country and the impact — what it would be, in your own home state," Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., said in July. "So it's not as simple as what one state might like."