Time travel isn’t just part of the plot line for science fiction books and films. Like Michael J. Fox in the three “Back to the Future” films, most of us travel backward and forward in time on regular basis – and now we’re doing it again.
At 2 a.m. Sunday, daylight saving time begins. We “spring forward” one hour – even though the season of spring doesn’t begin until March 20. And we’ll travel backward in time on at 2 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 3 when we “fall back” in time. At least then we’ll be doing so in the right season, since fall begins Sept. 23.
But if Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, both Florida Republicans, have their way, our forward and backward travels through time will come to an end. They filed a bill in the Senate Wednesday to extend daylight saving time for the entire year. They call it the Sunshine Protection Act.
DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME IS DUMB AND DISRUPTIVE – HERE'S WHAT I'M DOING ABOUT IT
The senators introduced the bill because the Florida Legislature voted last year to adopt year-round daylight saving time. But the change can’t take effect unless Congress changes federal law.
Currently only Hawaii and Arizona are exempt from the Uniform Time Act enacted in 1966 to make daylight saving time nationwide.
Rubio and Scott said in a joint news release that making daylight saving time permanent across the nation would reduce a lot of bad things, including: car crashes, car accidents involving pedestrians, heart attacks, strokes, seasonal depression, robberies, childhood obesity and energy use.
Hmm … that sure sounds good. If we moved our clocks forward two hours would we get twice as much benefit?
Rubio introduced the Sunshine Protection Act last year and it went nowhere in Congress. So maybe he and Scott need to think about rebranding the legislation this year to help it become law now.
We can start with a new name. “Sunshine Protection” sounds like the name of a suntan lotion you buy at the drugstore.
The senators need a name the media will go wild over, giving their legislation massive news coverage. How about: The Yellow New Deal? After all, sunshine is basically yellow, at least when little kids draw it with crayons.
More importantly, the media write and broadcast news stories every day about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, an impossible socialist dream that would send our economy into a tailspin and turn America into another Venezuela.
And if they want their bill to mooooove through Congress, Rubio and Scott need to emphasize that it will make dairy cows a lot happier, since they won’t have to adjust to new milking times. That’s a heck of a lot better than the fate awaiting cows under the Green New Deal, which calls for getting rid of them because of the global warming caused by – pardon the expression – cow farts.
The Yellow New Deal would also makes airlines happier, because they won’t have to keep changing their schedules twice a year.
As far as I can tell, Amtrak doesn’t really operate on a fixed schedule, so it wouldn’t be affected. Trains just sort of show up from time to time, so that wouldn’t change.
And if the Yellow New Deal becomes law, millions of Americans will be very happy not to have to change their clocks twice a year. No one will be embarrassingly late for church or soccer practice or whatever else they do on Sunday mornings, so that’s a positive.
On balance, I’m in favor of the bill.
But the senators from Florida need to be careful for what they wish for. Ocasio-Cortez and her far-left supporters of the Green New Deal are trying to increase governmental control over the climate, the economy, health care, and pretty much everything else in our lives.
The Green New Deal is already attracting a lot of criticism due to its hefty cost. So the radical left may try to add some amendments to the Yellow New Deal to try to sneak through (or pay for) some of the same provisions they won’t get if the Green New Deal fails.
The real threat to sunlight, Democrats will surely argue, is Global Darkening. So they may add an amendment making it illegal for the sun to go down before 10 p.m. If the other things in the Green New Deal are possible, so is legislating the actions of the sun.
That extra hours of sunlight, the Democrats can will argue, would allow workers to work overtime to earn more money, which would be taxed at a new 100 percent tax rate. That could pay for a tiny part of the costs for the retrofitting of buildings and all the other wild ideas in the Green New Deal.
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But perhaps the best argument the senators can make for instituting daylight saving time 365 days a year is that Russia no longer observes it. That should prove, beyond a doubt, that there was “no collusion” with the Russians in drawing up the bill springing us forward once and for all.
Who can possibly argue with a plan that would move America forward and leave Russia behind?