By Rita Cook
Correspondent
Texas Metro News
WASHINGTON D.C. – I was recently driving through Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky and weaving in and out of time zones uncertain what time I was driving into or out of on my trip.
Last week on July 14 the U.S. House of Representatives passed a law that should allow travelers and residents around the U.S. a more accurate measurement.
Congress overwhelmingly passed the Sunshine Protection Act by a 308-117 vote to make daylight saving time permanent nationwide.
There was opposition to the bill with 95 Democrats and 22 Republicans voting against the Sunshine Protection Act during the House vote.
The bill now heads to the Senate, where its future remains uncertain, meaning clock changes will continue until it passes both chambers and is signed into law.
Senate is not expected to pass the bill without debate and there is active resistance from a bipartisan group of senators.
Reported by a number of capitol hill outlets including Yahoo News and Newsweek the bloc of at least 13 lawmakers on the Senate Committee opposes the bill and previously voted against advancing the daylight-saving framework in committee hearings or have publicly vowed to block it.
This includes Republicans: Tom Cotton (Arkansas), John Thune (South Dakota), Roger Wicker (Mississippi), Deb Fischer (Nebraska), Jerry Moran (Kansas), Dan Sullivan (Alaska), Ted Budd (North Carolina), and Tim Sheehy (Montana) and Democrats: Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), Gary Peters (Michigan), Tammy Duckworth (Illinois), Jacky Rosen (Nevada), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (Delaware).
A variety of reasons have come into play for their resistance including dark winter commutes because under permanent daylight-saving time, the sun would not rise until between 8:30 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. across many northern and midwestern states during the winter.
Other reasons cited include accident hazards with an emphasis on school children forced to wait for buses and walk to school in pitch darkness, disruption to health and natural sleep cycles, and flight scheduling chaos leading to financial losses. In fact, airline lobbyists point out that the rest of the world (including Europe) will still change their clocks. If the U.S. stops, it throws off carefully coordinated international flight schedules, which is a logistical nightmare. A final reason also included complications for religious communities such as delayed morning prayers in the Orthodox Jewish faith, which would result in conflicts with work and school.
The political landscape has also changed significantly in the Senate since it last considered this issue.
In 2022, the Senate accidentally passed a similar bill via a fast-track procedural mechanism called “unanimous consent” because no one formally stood up to object. Afterward, multiple senators admitted they would have blocked it had they realized the vote was happening. Now that senators are fully alert to the issue, it will require a traditional, heavily debated roll-call vote, making passage much more difficult.
The primary reason the bill still has a fighting chance is strong executive branch pressure. President Donald Trump has heavily championed the House-passed bill, calling it incredibly important and vowing to “work very hard” to pressure the Senate to send it to his desk.
Even if it does pass, states will not be forced to adopt permanent daylight-saving time. Under the text of the Sunshine Protection Act, individual states have the explicit right to opt out of the law before it takes effect, provided they choose to observe permanent standard time instead.
The existing exemptions that already observe year-round standard time will not be forced to change including Hawaii, Arizona (excluding the Navajo Nation, which does observe daylight saving time), and U.S. Territories (including Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, and the U.S. Virgin Islands).
As for Texas, it is officially legally positioned to follow the new law immediately.
In June 2025, Governor Greg Abbott signed House Bill 1393 into law. This state-level “trigger law” establishes “Texas Time” and that automatically transitions the state to permanent daylight-saving time the exact moment federal law permits it.
Rita Cook has traveled the world as a writer/editor specializing in travel, food, auto, crime and politics. The former state rep staffer, film producer and 12-time author is a correspondent for Texas Metro News and the EIC of The Insider Mag.
