WASHINGTON — Maybe South Dakota Rep. Dusty Johnson was just ahead of his time.
Last year, the two-term congressman signed onto the Sunshine Protection Act, a measure that would make permanent daylight saving time — and help Americans forgo that groggy biannual tradition of pushing clocks ahead or backward, while losing or gaining an hour of sunlight.
On Monday, March 14, his colleagues in the U.S. Senate unanimously passed a bill to do the same .
Now, he says the ball is in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's court.
"If she [Pelosi] puts this on the floor, this will pass," Johnson told Forum News Service on Tuesday, March 15.
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On Wednesday, Pelosi told The Hill newspaper that while she supported making daylight saving time permanent, she wanted to wait to bring the issue to a vote until she had an opportunity to "socialize" the bill in the Democratic caucus.
Daylight saving time first arrived in the U.S. in 1918 as a war-time measure to conserve energy and proved popular with merchants, as an extra hour of daylight in the evening fostered shopping. But the practice wasn't standardized until the 1960s.
In 1974, President Richard Nixon signed permanent daylight saving time into law . But the practice lost favor with a majority of Americans and was repealed a year later by his successor, President Gerald Ford.
In South Dakota, a bill brought by Rep. Lana Greenfield, R-Doland, deadlocked 33-33 in the House of Representatives in 2020 .
A spokeswoman for Johnson said his office has heard from thousands of constituents about the bill. For his part, Johnson says he grew attuned to the sunlight squeeze wrought by daylight saving when he tried in vain to go trap-shooting with his middle son one afternoon after work.
"By the time we got out there, it was already getting so dark," Johnson said. "I think families will get so much more value of having the sunlight in the 5 o'clock hour than in the beginning of the workday."
Christopher Vondracek is the South Dakota correspondent for Forum News Service. Contact Vondracek at cvondracek@forumcomm.com , or follow him on Twitter: @ChrisVondracek .
