It’s Daylight Savings Time Somewhere (in Texas, Maybe Forever)

As rapper M.C. Hammer once said: You can’t touch this.

Clocks, that is. Last week, lawmakers approved a bill that would abolish the widely unpopular biannual time change, adopting a permanent daylight savings time for the state. The bill now awaits a sign-off from Gov. Greg Abbott. It joins a set of proposals on (or near) Abbott’s desk that span a really, truly befuddling range of priorities: a total ban on THC products, a $1.5 billion dollar “Hollywood handout,” and a crucial bill clarifying the timeline to receive a life-saving abortion.

If passed, this bill would change…nothing. Big win for government!

It’s superseded by a decades-old federal law which standardizes and mandates the clock changes. While states can opt out of daylight savings time entirely, they can’t adopt it. Without federal action, Texas Time is essentially moot.

Texas joins a handful of other states including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, and Washington, that have expressed interest in adopting year-round daylight savings. Indeed, the majority of the country (54%, according to a Gallup poll) and Texans do support scrapping the clock change entirely. A federal change is perhaps not so far-fetched, either. President Donald Trump has publicly supported “locking the clock,” and Congress has debated the proposal at length before, according to POLITICO.

Is everything bigger in Texas? Yeah. Is everything better? Well, perhaps not.

Brighter? Hold onto your cowboy hats. It just might be.