Sunshine Protection Act of 2025
Floor Speech
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Mr. SOTO. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Jersey for yielding me time.
Mr. Speaker, I want to start with a little history lesson. Back in 2013, this was my bill. I wrote this bill. I thought it was a pretty good name, the Sunshine Protection Act, back in the day. It was for good reason.
I had gotten to the State senate. In the State House, you can only file a certain number of bills, but once we got to the State senate, I really got jelling on coming up with ideas that would help our State. Up until that point, every idea on trying to stop the clock change was going to standard time.
No one likes standard time. It is darkness in the wintertime, and so we, as The Sunshine State--a lot of Floridians here--and coastal New Jerseyans and others here from Louisiana, we like the sunshine. It made far more sense to keep daylight saving time, which is the 8 months out of the year that we have light in the afternoons and evenings.
I filed that bill without a press release back in 2013. It became statewide news. For 4 years straight, every time this bill came up, it was the most viewed bill in the Florida Senate for 4 years straight.
I will say that I never got a chance to pass that bill out of the Florida Legislature, although I know some of my colleagues who are here today ended up doing it after I was gone. It is one of the burdens of being a Democrat in a Republican-dominated legislature.
Mr. Speaker, here we are many years later, 13 years later, and an idea that I got to write many years ago now is being led by great leaders like Vern Buchanan--I am a proud cosponsor of this--and Gus Bilirakis, a great Floridians whom I enjoy working with, and, of course, Frank Pallone, our ranking member.
There is a reason this bill was so popular for so long. Small businesses like it because people, after work, go out to businesses and get to have fun. Beach communities like it. With that one extra hour of sunshine, kids can go out and play after school.
We saw that people are sick of the changing of the clocks. Also, the local farmer doesn't need Big Government to tell them what time to wake up in the morning. They know what time they want to wake up, no matter what, so that change isn't going to affect them at all.
Then I encourage schools and educational institutions around the Nation, to adjust school start times based upon what they think is best to keep kids safe.
At the end of the day, we have talked about how it is good for business, good for recreation, and good to help out with making sure that we don't have this public health issue every time we are changing the clocks back and forth. It is finally time to bring sunshine across the Nation, and I urge my colleagues to support this amazing Sunshine Protection Act.
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