Of all the issues capable of starting a Republican family feud, daylight saving time probably wouldn’t have made my top hundred. Yet here we are.

President Trump is pushing the Senate to pass the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight saving time permanent for most of the country. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas is helping stand in the way, arguing that Americans may like brighter evenings right up until their children are waiting for the school bus in the dark.

The disagreement became considerably more colorful when Trump publicly posted what he said was Cotton’s cellphone number and urged Arkansans to call him. Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana subsequently defended Cotton and criticized Trump for making the number public. Apparently, even the humble kitchen clock can become a contact sport in Washington.

Behind all the political theater, however, there’s a legitimate policy question worth considering: If Americans are finally going to stop changing their clocks twice a year, which time should we keep?

Cotton’s Case: The Morning Gets a Vote Too

Cotton’s position begins with something on which nearly everybody seems able to agree: changing the clocks twice a year is annoying. He isn’t defending the ritual of springing forward and falling back. His objection is specifically to making daylight saving time permanent.

Cotton points to what happened when the United States tried essentially the same experiment in 1974. Congress had enacted year-round daylight saving time during the energy crisis, hoping that shifting an hour of usable daylight toward the evening would conserve energy. But winter arrived, and so did a rather inconvenient feature of the plan: the sun began rising extraordinarily late in many parts of the country.

Cotton argues that Arkansas families would face winter sunrises around 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. under permanent daylight saving time. Farther north and west within their time zones, the effects could be even greater. Seattle could approach a 9:00 a.m. sunrise, while places such as Williston, North Dakota, could remain dark until close to 9:45.

That particularly concerns Cotton when it comes to children. His argument is straightforward. Kids already leave home early for school. Under permanent daylight saving time, many would be walking to school, standing alongside roads waiting for buses, or being driven through morning traffic before sunrise for weeks or months during the winter.

And Cotton isn’t imagining the historical backlash. The United States really did try extended winter daylight saving time in 1974. Complaints about dark mornings spread rapidly, school schedules were altered around the country, and Congress ultimately backed away from the experiment. A Department of Transportation report from the period found that school schedules affecting nearly half the students in reporting states were changed because of the dark mornings. The safety statistics themselves were more complicated than the public perception—research didn’t conclusively establish that year-round DST increased overall traffic fatalities—but the disruption was quite real.

Cotton therefore sees history as offering a warning: Americans may love the phrase more evening sunshine, but winter daylight has to come from somewhere. The government can’t order the sun to stay up longer. It can only move the numbers printed on the clock. More sunlight at 5:30 p.m. necessarily means less sunlight at 7:30 a.m.

Cotton’s position also has support well beyond Republican politics. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends ending seasonal clock changes but favors permanent standard time, arguing that morning light and earlier evening darkness correspond more closely with human circadian biology. The American Medical Association has likewise endorsed permanent standard time rather than permanent daylight saving time.

So, Cotton’s argument isn’t really, “Keep changing the clocks.” It’s, “Before we lock the clock, make sure we lock it in the right place.”

Trump’s Case: Give the Evening Back Its Sunshine

Trump looks at the same problem from almost exactly the opposite direction. He agrees that Americans should stop changing their clocks twice every year, but he believes the obvious answer is to make daylight saving time permanent. And there’s an intuitive appeal to his argument.

Most people are awake and active during the late afternoon and early evening. They’re coming home from work, attending their children’s games, walking the dog, shopping, eating out, exercising, golfing, gardening, hunting, or simply enjoying some time outside. An extra hour of daylight during that portion of the day is therefore more useful to many Americans than an extra hour shortly after sunrise.

Trump has repeatedly emphasized precisely that point, arguing that afternoon daylight benefits families, recreation, agriculture, and businesses. He’s cited golfers, tennis players, hunters, and farmers, while the PGA Tour has formally backed the Sunshine Protection Act because later daylight allows more time for tournaments and recreational golf.

There’s also a public-safety argument. Trump contends that later daylight could reduce opportunities for crime because more people would return home from work, shop, and conduct other activities before darkness. Research surrounding daylight saving time has produced evidence suggesting that additional evening light may provide some crime and traffic-safety benefits, although the size of those benefits and the tradeoffs with darker mornings remain subjects of dispute.

Then there’s the argument that probably resonates most with ordinary Americans: enough already with changing the clocks. The House agreed. On July 14, it passed the Sunshine Protection Act by a bipartisan 308–117 vote. The legislation would establish permanent daylight saving time for most states, while jurisdictions already exempt from daylight saving time could continue using permanent standard time.

Trump sees the legislation as one of those rare Washington opportunities to do something simple, tangible and broadly popular. No sweeping bureaucracy. No thousand-page regulatory regime. No congressional committee spending seventeen months deciding whether a wall clock constitutes critical infrastructure. Just pick a time and leave it there.

Public frustration with clock changing gives Trump some ammunition. An AP-NORC poll found only 12 percent of Americans favoring the existing twice-yearly system, while 47 percent opposed it and another 40 percent were neutral. That doesn’t automatically translate into overwhelming support for permanent daylight saving time—people disagree about which permanent time they prefer—but it does suggest that the status quo has remarkably few enthusiastic defenders.

Stop Moving the Clock—But Don’t Move Noon

On the basic question, Trump’s right. It’s time to stop changing the clocks twice a year. The seasonal switch is disruptive, unpopular, and increasingly difficult to justify when there’s broad agreement that Americans would rather choose one system and stick with it. Even medical organizations that disagree with Trump about which time should become permanent agree that the twice-yearly transitions should go. But once we get beyond that point, I think Cotton has the stronger argument. If we’re going to lock the clock, we should lock it on standard time.

I understand why permanent daylight saving time sounds better. Believe me, watching darkness settle in during the late afternoon in November isn’t exactly a mood booster. Given the choice between sunlight after dinner and sunlight first thing in the morning, the evening sounds pretty attractive. But government policy shouldn’t be based entirely on which arrangement feels nicest at 5:00 p.m.

There’s a natural rhythm to light and darkness that human beings didn’t invent. Genesis 1:14 tells us that God ordained the lights in the heavens “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.” That verse certainly doesn’t tell Congress whether the clocks should read 7:30 or 8:30, and we shouldn’t pretend the Bible settles a modern time-zone policy that it never addresses. But it does remind us that human schedules ultimately operate within a created order rather than the other way around.

Standard time corresponds more closely to that reality because solar noon occurs closer to clock noon, morning light arrives earlier, and darkness arrives earlier at night. That alignment matters particularly for sleep and circadian rhythms, which is why sleep specialists overwhelmingly prefer permanent standard time.

There’s also a basic prudence argument. We’ve tried winter daylight saving time before. Americans discovered that “more evening sunshine” sounded considerably better in July than it did when children were standing beside roads before sunrise in January. Congress retreated from year-round daylight saving time in 1974 after encountering precisely those problems. The historical evidence isn’t clean enough to claim that permanent DST produced a nationwide epidemic of traffic fatalities, but it’s more than sufficient to show that dark winter mornings caused substantial disruption and public dissatisfaction.

We ought to have some respect for lessons already learned. When the country has tried something, encountered predictable problems, abandoned it, and then fifty years later considers doing essentially the same thing again, “maybe we should remember why we stopped” isn’t obstructionism. It’s institutional memory.

There’s also something slightly amusing about the phrase “an extra hour of daylight.” Neither Trump nor Congress has discovered how to manufacture sunlight. Permanent DST simply relocates an hour of light from the morning to the evening according to the clock.

That trade may benefit golf courses, restaurants, retailers, and people who enjoy outdoor recreation after work. Those are legitimate considerations. But I’d place children traveling to school, early-shift workers, sleep health, and basic alignment with the natural light-dark cycle somewhat higher on the priority list. And that’s where I part company with Trump on this one. He’s correctly identified the problem but chosen what I think is the weaker solution.

There’s no reason Republicans should feel obligated to agree with a Republican president simply because he wants a Republican senator to fall in line. Cotton is doing exactly what a senator is supposed to do: evaluating legislation and representing what he believes are the interests of his constituents. The fact that Trump carried Arkansas overwhelmingly doesn’t transfer Arkansas’s Senate seat to the White House.

As for publishing Cotton’s personal cellphone number, that was unnecessary and counterproductive. A disagreement over whether sunrise should occur at 7:30 or 8:30 in January probably doesn’t require unleashing thousands of strangers on somebody’s phone. Kennedy was right to criticize it.

There’s a broader principle here worth preserving: political allies ought to be allowed to disagree. If Republicans believe in representative government, individual judgment, and limiting concentrated power, then senators occasionally telling a Republican president “no” shouldn’t be treated as an act of betrayal. Otherwise, constitutional principles become awfully flexible depending on whose name is currently on the Oval Office door.

So, Congress should absolutely finish the job Trump has helped push to the forefront. End the clock changing. No more springing forward. No more falling back. No more wandering around the house twice a year trying to remember which appliances update themselves and discovering three weeks later that the microwave has been lying to us.

But instead of permanent daylight saving time, Congress should seriously reconsider permanent standard time. On this particular issue, Trump has the better slogan, but Cotton has the better clock.