On Thu, 30 Jul 2026 at 12:01, Brooks Harris via tz <[email protected]> wrote:
> Either H.R. 139 or H.R. 9638 would be federally imposed law on States. > That seems to remove choice and violate Federalism, doesn't it? > Not automatically; these things exist on a spectrum, after all. Existing law recognizes that there is a federal interest in coordinating the states on matters of timekeeping, first with the Standard Time Act of 1918 (or "Calder Act") that formalized the zones the railways had been using for a few decades, and then with the Uniform Time Act of 1966 which standardized a patchwork of DST observance dates as well as its subsequent amendments. H.R. 139, as presently drafted, would remove choice from states — and in fact, would repeal the DST opt-out mechanism entirely, relying on legacy language to avoid forcing Arizona, Hawaii, and the territories forward. H.R. 9638, by contrast, would increase state choice significantly at the potential cost of a chaotic mess of local observances — it would allow year-round standard time, year-round daylight time, and optional seasonal time changes to coexist, while also repealing mandated transition dates for areas choosing to observe seasonal time changes. Neither approach is inherently right or wrong, but each swings the pendulum in a different way and therefore raises different concerns. Arguably these two bills are pretty close to the two possible extremes; still others have aimed for somewhat more nuanced approaches. For comparison, when the EU was last considering abolishing seasonal time changes in 2019, it tried to thread the needle between the two paradigms. A multi-phased decision-making process was planned in which member states were explicitly encouraged to work together on which year-round time they wanted to adopt and were required to notify the European Commission of their initial decisions. The Commission was then to look at all the submissions and warn the member states of foreseeable issues and disruptions that would result, before ultimately allowing each member state to choose to either maintain or reverse its initial decision. However, if the results of this consultation would have created too much of an inharmonious patchwork, it reserved the option to delay implementation in order to seek a top-down legislative solution instead. -- Tim Parenti
