Democrats are blamed for a lot these days. They’re blamed for the price of gasoline, the existence of Ukraine, the humiliation of white people, and the stubborn failure of electronic voting machines to accurately record all of Donald J. Trump’s votes in a county which delivered, using electronic voting machines, a bit over 69 percent of their presidential votes to the man — a higher percentage, by the way, than they delivered to him the first time he was on their ballots.

The accuracy and/or wisdom of blaming Democrats for such things will have to fall on somebody else’s shoulders this week, however. Instead, I must bury Democrats under the uncompromising weight of personal annoyance created by the single hour’s amount of government-induced sleep deprivation incurred against my person this week. 

I speak, of course, of Daylight Savings Time — that noxious biennial American tradition in which the government, like King Canute ordering the tides to keep their distance while he walks through their waves, orders our clocks to halt and skip at its whim.

I know what you’re thinking — surely there are greater evils in the world to address. Perhaps so, but does not the Bible command us to consider the motes in our own eyes before we behold the beams in the eyes of others? Yes, you concede, that does sound vaguely familiar (if perhaps a little off), but I did insert a convincing-looking hyperlink, so surely the Bible’s commandment, as quoted, has been correctly sourced and verified. Even so, why are Democrats to blame for Daylight Savings Time? How could they possibly be responsible?

What if I told you that the first president to institute Daylight Savings Time was a Democrat?

What if I told you that the next president to institute Daylight Savings Time was also a Democrat? 

What if I then told you that yet another Democratic president, with support from a majority-Democratic Congress, passed the very Daylight Savings Time law currently in effect? 

Would it convince you if I told you the Californians have been trying to abolish Daylight Savings Time for years, only their majority-Democratic Legislature consistently refuses to follow through? 

What if I told you that, when Republicans last held majorities in Nevada’s Legislature, they passed a resolution requesting greater flexibility from Congress in how states can stop flip-flopping their clocks during Daylight Savings Time? 

What if I told you a Republican put a bill before our majority-Democratic legislature in 2019 but it was never even heard in committee?

What if I told you a Republican president tried to make Daylight Savings Time permanent nearly fifty years ago — just like Republican Sen. Marco Rubio is now trying to do — only he was subsequently impeached and forced to resign by a majority-Democratic Congress?

It’s all true, every word of it.

***

The urge to meddle with our clocks began, as so many of the world’s evils did, with the Kaiser.

During World War I, facing persistent and severe resource shortages, the German Empire — led by Kaiser Wilhelm II — and its allies adopted Daylight Savings Time as a measure to reduce coal consumption. The hope was that, by waking factory workers up and starting their shifts closer to sunrise, the sun’s natural heat and light would be better distributed across each worker’s shift. Additionally, by going to bed earlier, factory workers would burn less coal at night to keep warm.

Unfortunately, the Kaiser’s inhuman push for greater Teutonic efficiency from his captive workforce was admired and copied by none other than the same former Princeton professor who introduced The Birth of a Nation, a notorious piece of Lost Cause Confederate apologia, to the White House. I speak, of course, of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson, who signed our nation’s first law mandating Daylight Savings Time, the Standard Time Act, in 1918.

Now, was the Standard Time Act originally written by William M. Calder, a Republican senator from New York? Well, yes. Did Edwin Roberts, Nevada’s lone congressman at the time and a Republican, vote in favor of the measure? Also yes.

None of that matters, however, because the important thing is that our nation’s Democratic president didn’t attempt to veto the measure, which makes its passage his fault. After all, the office of the president does not serve as a co-equal branch of government to two other, independent branches of government. Instead, as several online constitutional scholars have patiently explained to me through several anonymous social media posts, the president is actually the captain of the United States. As the captain, the president has complete authority — and, by extension, complete responsibility — over the entirety of our nation and its people. That means, whenever something we don’t like occurs, it’s the president’s fault.

This, so it has been explained to me, is the system of government the Founding Fathers originally envisioned.

Besides, even if none of that were true, when it came time to overturn the Standard Time Act in 1919 after the end of World War I, Wilson vetoed its removal. Thankfully, Congress, in turn, overruled his veto.

Apparently Woodrow Wilson wasn’t a very good captain.

***

The next time a Democrat got the urge to move our clocks around also involved a world war.

Thankfully, unlike Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt only wanted to move the clock once — ahead by one hour, as luck would have it, which effectively made Daylight Savings Time permanent for the duration of the second World War. Better yet, the War Time Act, as written, automatically expired six months after World War II ended. Since Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, however, that would have ended Daylight Savings Time in February — so, instead, Congress passed H. R. 3974 on September 25, which terminated Daylight Savings Time five days later. 

The nation once again fell back into peace, prosperity and Standard Time.

Well, except where states and cities continued to switch between Daylight Savings and Standard Time. In 1949, California passed Proposition 12, a voter initiative that moved the state’s clocks ahead an hour on the last Sunday in April and moved them back on the last Sunday in September. Then, in 1962, California’s voters passed Proposition 6, which extended California’s observance of Daylight Savings Time from the last Sunday in September to the last Sunday in October.

Nevada, meanwhile — as was, is, and shall ever remain our tradition — looked over California’s shoulder and eventually copied the Golden State’s homework. In 1964, Gov. Grant Sawyer (Democrat) issued a proclamation matching the beginning of Nevada’s Daylight Savings Time with California’s “fast time”.

Eastern states and cities, however, preferred to exercise more creativity — at one point, the lack of coordination of Daylight Savings Time observances between different localities led to seven possible time changes along the 35 mile stretch of Route 2 between Moundsville, West Virginia and Steubenville, Ohio.

To better standardize the nation’s clocks, yet another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, signed yet another bill mandating when our clocks might or might not shift according to the federal government’s whim. The Uniform Time Act of 1966, authored by Congressman Harley O. Staggers (D-West Virginia), granted states the right to either observe Daylight Savings Time, or not — but if a state chose to observe Daylight Savings Time, it had to do so according to the federal government’s timetable.

When presented with the bill, Walter Baring (Democrat), Nevada’s lone congressman in 1966, abstained.

***

That, plus some selectively partisan amnesia of decidedly not Democratic President Nixon’s attempt to apply Daylight Savings Time across the entire nation in 1974 (I have been informed from several reliable sources that nobody actually wants to remember 1974, or Richard Nixon, so this should be fine), along with a few amendments which moved the exact dates states may begin and end Daylight Savings Time through the intervening decades that were passed by decidedly not Democratic presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, brings us closer to the present day.

In 2015, Republicans — for the first and last time since the start of the Great Depression — had majorities in both houses of Nevada’s Legislature. One of the agenda items they considered, alongside two of the largest tax increases in state history, was AJR4, an Assembly Joint Resolution to make Daylight Savings Time permanent throughout the state. The reason it was a resolution instead of a bill, however, is because, according to the aforementioned Uniform Time Act of 1966, states may choose not to observe Daylight Savings Time (as in most of Arizona), or they may choose to observe Daylight Savings Time according to the federal government’s calendar — but states do not, and did not then, have the power to choose to observe Daylight Savings Time all year.

Curiously, this stand wasn’t motivated by war, which was FDR’s motivation for putting the nation on Daylight Savings Time for a few years, nor was it motivated by something along the lines of the oil embargo that prodded Nixon to adopt Daylight Savings Time throughout 1974. Nevada’s Republicans weren’t trying to save energy — they just wanted Nevadans to have more daylight towards the end of their winter days.

A few years later, another curious thing happened. For once, California copied our homework.

In 2018, California passed Proposition 7, which restored the power of California’s legislature to directly change their state’s daylight saving time observances. The proposition further granted California’s legislature the power to make California observe Daylight Savings Time year-round — if the federal government would allow it. Proposition 7 originally began as AB-807, which was written by two members of the California State Assembly — Kansen Chu (D-Berryessa) and Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego), both Democrats.

Since the passage of Proposition 7, however, California’s very Democratic legislature has done very little with its new powers to fix California’s clocks. Immediately after the measure’s passage, the original authors of Proposition 7 submitted a bill numbered, appropriately enough, AB-7 — it passed the Assembly without objection but was never considered by the Senate.

More recently, however, another bill, AB-2868, was introduced to the floor by Assemblymember Steven Choi (R-Irvine) in February. Despite being written by a Republican, it’s currently scheduled to be heard by committee at the end of March. If California’s exceptionally Democratic legislature actually lets AB-2868 get heard in committee, it will be more consideration than Nevada’s Sen. Joe Hardy (R-Boulder City) received for SB153, which sought to achieve the same goal in 2019 but never received a hearing.

Finally, less than a week ago, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed S.623, the Sunshine Protection Act of 2021, which, once ratified, would make Daylight Savings Time permanent in states that currently observe Daylight Savings Time. 

Its sponsor? Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida).

***

It might seem a little strange to frame a measure, which, once ratified, will permanently prevent states from switching between Daylight Savings Time and Standard Time should they want to as some sort of partisan victory for freedom-loving Republicans. This is doubly strange since, once passed, it will restore a status quo most of the country last experienced during the last few months of Nixon’s ignominious presidency.

The reason I do so, however, isn’t because I secretly yearn to return to a world in which school district officials recommend children wear reflective tape while they ride their bus or walk to school in the dark — which, by the way, actually happened in Washoe County. Yes, speaking as a commuting office worker, it would be nice to have more daylight after work during the winter when I can actually use it instead of having my scarce December daylight first spent in a car, then wasted away in an office. Yes, I think switching to permanent Daylight Savings Time is a good idea for me in particular. It might even be a good idea for you, too.

The reason I’m framing Daylight Savings Time with a partisan lens is, instead, sadness. It’s frustration. It’s disappointment. 

A candidate for Nevada secretary of state with a high likelihood of reaching the general election is campaigning on a series of paranoid delusions. A woman who believes cancer is a fungus and apparently can’t figure out what businesses she owns or what tax liabilities she’s incurred believes she’s qualified to be a treasurer of anything more consequential than a personal checking account. Meanwhile, the same Democrats who claim Nevada doesn’t need conspiracy theories are telling everyone that oil and gas companies are conspiring to steal their money.

I would rather watch partisan hacks argue over who should get credit for Daylight Savings Time, and who should get credit for attempting to abolish it, than what anyone is actually arguing over right now. I would rather see Republicans win — or “win” — for abolishing Daylight Savings Time than almost anything else they appear to be motivated to fight for right now. 

I am, in other words, trying to be the change I want to see in the world.

I’m not going to pretend that a world in which Republicans and Democrats scream at each other about clocks is a good world. It’s not. It sounds like an absolutely intolerable world, in fact.

But it would certainly be a better world than the one we live in now.

David Colborne ran for office twice and served on the executive committees for his state and county Libertarian Party chapters. He is now an IT manager, a registered nonpartisan voter, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Twitter @DavidColborne or email him at [email protected].