Trump pushes Senate to vote on permanent daylight saving time bill

Every few years somebody in Washington rediscovers that changing the clocks twice a year is dumb, and every few years it goes exactly nowhere. Trump pushing the Senate to actually vote on the House bill is the first sign in a while that this particular bit of common sense might survive contact with Congress. That alone is worth noting, because the usual pattern is a lot of nodding along followed by silence.

The case for permanent daylight saving time isn't complicated. Nobody wakes up in March thrilled about losing an hour of sleep, and nobody in November is happy that it's pitch dark by five o'clock. Farmers didn't ask for this, parents don't like it, and the studies on spikes in heart attacks and car accidents right after the switch aren't exactly ambiguous. This is one of those rare issues where the public is basically unified and the holdup is pure legislative inertia.

What's actually interesting here isn't the policy, it's the mechanism. The House already passed something. It's sitting in the Senate the way half of everything sits in the Senate, waiting for leadership to decide it's worth floor time. A president leaning on that logjam publicly is a pretty normal use of the bully pulpit, and it's the kind of thing that used to happen more often before every small fix got treated like a hill to die on.

If this actually gets a vote and passes, nobody is going to remember it as some grand political victory. It's just clocks. But it'll be a small reminder that Washington can occasionally do the obvious thing when somebody bothers to push for it, instead of letting an easy fix rot in committee for another decade.