Everybody agrees this is stupid. Everybody does it anyway, twice a year, forever. It is the last thing in America we all agree on — so it is where we start.
Ask anyone. Left, right, city, country, union hall, country club — ask them about changing the clocks twice a year and you will get the same answer. This is stupid. There is no constituency for it. There is no lobby defending it. There is not one person in America whose life is improved by it. And we keep doing it, every single year, forever.
That is not a scheduling problem. That is a demonstration that we have forgotten how to finish anything, even the easy things, even the things nobody is against.
So this administration will not ask Congress to fix it. This administration will demand it. One bill, roughly one sentence long, on the desk, first.
And to be extremely clear about the part people keep trying to argue with me about: I do not care which one we keep. Standard time, daylight time, I genuinely do not care. It literally does not matter what number we agree to call it — the sun does what the sun does either way. We are not trying to choose the better time. We are trying to choose one time, any time, and then never discuss it again. Pick one and stop.
Here is why this is first and not last. We are a country that currently cannot agree on anything. We have lost the muscle. You do not rebuild that by starting with the hardest thing in the room — you rebuild it by proving to ourselves, once, in public, that three hundred and forty million people can still identify a dumb thing and stop doing it together. Then we go find a bigger one.
Asked and answered
- Isn’t this a small thing to run for president on?
- Yes. That is the entire point. It is small, it is obvious, and we still cannot get it done — which tells you something much worse about us than the clocks do. Start small. Prove we can still do it. Then start asking about the big ones.
- Which time would we keep — standard or daylight?
- I do not care. I really, genuinely do not care. It does not matter what we call it; it is not going to change how much daylight there is. Pick either one. Flip a coin. I will sign whichever one reaches me and I will not complain about it afterward.
- But one of them is better for your health, isn’t it?
- Probably, and people who study sleep for a living should absolutely be in the room when Congress picks. They should not be the reason Congress fails to pick. If this turns into a ten-year argument about which time is superior, we have reproduced the exact problem this plank exists to solve.
- What about the farmers?
- We asked. They did not request this, have never requested this, and have spent a century being confused about why they keep getting blamed for it.
- What about Arizona and Hawaii?
- I’ve never been there.
- Why is this a resignation trigger?
- Because it is finishable and you can check the work yourself, in March, by looking at a clock. A promise you cannot verify is not a promise.