In March the U.S. Senate passed a measure making Daylight Saving Time permanent.
“We know that the majority of Americans do not want to keep switching the clocks back and forth,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said in a statement to The Post, adding that she had received calls arguing in favor of both sides. Permanent standard time advocates don’t want children to wait in dark winter mornings for a school bus; permanent daylight saving time proponents want to help businesses enjoy more sunshine during operating hours, she said. A congressional aide who has been working on the issue put it more bluntly: “We’d be pissing off half the country no matter what,” said the aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal deliberations….
Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) and other lawmakers have said they’re waiting on the Transportation Department, which helps govern enforcement of time zones, to review the effects of permanently changing the clocks. While the transportation agency in September agreed to conduct a study, the due date for that analysis — Dec. 31, 2023 — suggests that the issue may not get serious consideration in Congress again until 2024 at the earliest.
Well, as a somebody who isn’t a US citizen and has spent decades watching the US with the scientific interest of the legendary David Attenborough monitoring the activities of a colony of meerkats, I’d say it’s because the USA has the most ingenious political system ever conceived by the mind of man. It consists of two parties that hate each other’s guts. Both have about enough loyal following in elections to scrape out about 48% of what you need to gain a congressional majority. Who wins elections thus depends on the flip-flopping of a small number of so called ‘swing-voters’. When one of these two parties proposes something, even if it is extremely sensible, the other party feels it is its patriotic duty to oppose that measure at every step out of pure sectarian spite. It also doesn’t help that the president of the USA has powers that effectively make him a modern version of a medieval king. All of this combines to mean that in order to get anything done, like abolish daylight savings time, you either need a veto proof majority in both houses of congress or a trifecta with enough of a majority in both houses of congress to (a) override a presidential veto and (b) allow you to ignore your own party’s lunatic fringe. Unfortunately both parties are to varying degrees increasingly corrupt and/or suffer from ‘growing lunatic fringe syndrome’. Of course followers of either party will tell you this only applies to the ‘others’ and that their own side is the very definition of god given morality, wisdom and human virtue. Personally I think they are both full of s***.
