In the U.S., the Sunshine Protection Act made it feel like both sides of the aisle could agree on one thing: changing the clocks is nowadays outdated. So why are we still doing it? Spring marks many changes: warmer weather, longer days, blooming flowers  and, for many people around the world, the beginning of daylight saving time. In the United States, however, there is a growing push to do away with this particular rite of spring. A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the Congress has once again introduced a bill to make daylight saving time permanent. Known also as the Sunshine Protection Act, the bill shocked the country when it passed the Senate last year. Though it eventually died a slow death in the House of Representatives, the bill will now wend its way through the legislative process yet again. The idea behind the clock shift, often incorrectly called daylight savings time, is to maximize sunlight in the Northern Hemisphere. But people have long argued over the benefits of the time shift. Some point to studies showing that it can harm your health, while others just argue that the extra hours of daylight allow people to get outdoors in the evening. Many people credit Benjamin Franklin for daylight saving time thanks to a possibly satirical letter he penned for the Journal de Paris in seventeen eighty-four. In the letter, he expressed pure astonishment to see the sun rise at the early hour of six in the morning, long before most Parisians ever saw the light of day. If they were to rise with the sun, Franklin wrote, the city could save an immense sum form the candles burned in the dark evening hours. He never suggested a shift in clocks, however, instead offering other amusing solutions to the problem that included cannons firing in the street to rouse people from sleep taxes for shuttered windows, and candle sales restrictions. Other credit the idea to George Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand, who at the end of the nineteenth century suggested a two-hour shift to allow for more people post-work bug hunting. Soon after, a British activist named William Willett proposed a similar idea to prevent wasting daylight, bringing the concept to the Parliament in England in the early nineteen hundreds. It was not until resources became scarce during the first World War that Germany decided to go ahead with just such a plan, implementing the first daylight saving time to maximize resource use during sunlit hours. The United States soon followed suit, with their first seasonal time shift taking place at the end of the war. 
