Hereby and Forthwith, the Clock!

Satire, based on: Senate is skeptical about making daylight saving time permanent despite Trump’s pressure

My fellow constituents, I rise this evening (or this afternoon, depending on which clock you trust, and that, my friends, is the whole trouble) to speak on the Great Question of Our Age: what time is it?

Here are the bare-footed facts, and I give them to you straight, which is not my custom. Back in July the House of Representatives passed a bill making daylight saving time permanent, 308 to 117. Now the Associated Press reports that the United States Senate, that most deliberative of bodies (deliberative meaning “it ain’t moving”), is not likely to act on it before the year runs out. And so early this Sunday morning the whole nation will drag its clocks back an hour once again, like a mule hauling a wagon it has already hauled.

The President, as AP reports, posted a senator’s personal cellphone number on social media and ordered him to “GET IT DONE!” Let me be perfectly opaque: in all my years losing elections for county commissioner, the voters of Wilkes County never once asked for my cellphone number. I published it twice. Nobody called. Not even the donors (and I use that word loosely, as they only gave me a ham).

Now I am told other senators, mostly from the northern states, are against it too, because the sun would not come up over there till after nine in the morning and the young’uns would go to school in the dark. One senator from Ohio was asked whether the bill would pass, and AP reports he said, “No way.” Two words! I have never in my life said anything in two words. I once took forty-five minutes to say “present” at a roll call.

Let me set this before you in the plainest language a statesman can stand. The people want it. An AP-NORC poll last year found only 12 percent of grown Americans favor this business of springing up and falling back. Twelve percent! I have polled worse than that, but never on purpose. Congress even tried permanent daylight time once already, in the winter of 1973, and threw it out by October. So Washington has already done it, already undone it, and has now spent half a century arguing about doing it again. Hereby and forthwith, that is what we call “governing.”

My friends, I have a compromise. Applause line here. We split the difference and set every clock in America to half past confused. Senators may keep standard time, since they ain’t standing for anything else. Lobbyists get permanent daylight, so they can work the halls a while longer. And the plain voter, who has to get up for work in the morning dark no matter which hour the high-mucks pick, gets the same thing he always gets: a sunrise and a speech from me.

I never took a dime (I took an hour, twice a year, from every man, woman and rooster in the republic, and gave it back with no interest).

Paid for by the Committee to Keep Bilgewater Upright — Sen. Sorghum Bilgewater, Political Correspondent