If your body and brain feel confused by the annual changing of the clocks formally known as daylight saving — which took place on Sunday at 2 a.m., when clocks jumped ahead by an hour — try to imagine how much worse things were in 1948.

Why? Because while D.C. did change its clocks that year, it trailed behind other parts of the country in doing so — and residents had Congress to thank. In the era before D.C. governed itself, much of the city’s local affairs were decided by members of Congress. And yes, that included whether to impose daylight saving time.

That meant an annual scramble to pass a bill specific to D.C. authorizing the changing of the clocks. In true congressional fashion, there were times that scramble came too late, leaving the city in a manmade timezone of its own. One year, the delay left D.C. an hour behind many other states and cities for close to two weeks.

“The changeover from standard to daylight saving time in most United States cities at 2 a.m. Sunday will be confusing enough for their citizens,” reported the Washington Post in April 1948. “Even more confused will be those Washington citizens who will travel next week or who are concerned with radio networks, communications, stock market tickers and such human activities that are geared to out-of-town clocks.”

In the broader context of the history of daylight saving, this isn’t much of a surprise.

While we’re now used to the twice-annual changing of the clocks, such a nationwide policy wasn’t instituted until 1966. Before that, the country careened between periods when daylight saving was required of states (as during World War I and World War II) and others when it was left to their individual discretion. In 1951, for example, 25 states and D.C. observed daylight saving. But even then, uniformity was tough to come by: while the portions of Maryland and Virginia right around D.C. had daylight saving in place, other parts of those states didn’t. Under the 1966 law, states can exempt themselves from daylight saving time. Hawaii and parts of Arizona took that out.

If that seems strange, just consider what happened in D.C. in 1922, when President Warren G. Harding, himself an opponent of daylight saving, opted for an odd compromise: the clocks wouldn’t be changed, but government offices would just shift their schedules by an hour. That plan extended to D.C. public schools, but it wasn’t binding for local businesses. An article in the Washington Post a few years later summarized how Harding’s plan actually played out:

The result was that courts and banks vacillated back and forth between early and late opening times, streetcar schedules were mixed, parents protested at their children having to be at school so early, and in general nobody knew exactly what time they were supposed to be anywhere.

When in 1937 there was an effort on the Hill to formalize daylight saving for D.C. — then known as “fast time” — the memories of the 1922 experiment prompted significant opposition, including from the Standard Time Association of Washington. The “hastily organized” group accused proponents of daylight saving of trying to “disrupt feeding time for infants and invalids.”

A few years later, in 1941, Congress again debated whether to make daylight saving a national policy — starting with D.C. “There is no better way to induce the nation to save electric power than to have the government of its own capital city take the initial step.” That step didn’t happen that year.

While this may seem like quirky history, powerful pockets of opposition to the current practice of changing our clocks twice a year remain. Last week, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced a bill — called the “Sunshine Protection Act” — that would stop Americans from having to set their clocks back in the fall. (The idea has other vocal supporters.) Rubio’s proposal got quick support from the highest office in the land:

Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2019

This story first appeared on WAMU.