The Senate’s Daylight Saving Time Move Shocked Senators

Sen. Marco Rubio said he initially planned to bring up the daylight saving bill Monday, but Sen. Roger Wicker had placed a hold on it and his flight was delayed. The consent request was bumped to Tuesday so that Wicker could block it, but he never did.

Wicker said he has concerns that children will be at increased danger going to school during dark mornings, but said he ultimately declined to get involved because he is more focused on issues like the war in Ukraine.

“I chose not to stand in the way. I’m more interested in fighting other battles,” he said.

Other senators, it seems, were not told by their staff that the request was happening.

Coons is one of them. He said that he and some other senators reacted to the news by asking Rubio if they’d given everyone a heads up, and were told yes.

“It’s literally an issue my staff and I had never discussed, and they made an assumption that I don’t really care about daylight saving time,” Coons said. “And I don’t know if I do! I’ve never taken five minutes to stop and think about it.”

During a hotline, a senator’s legislative director typically vets the request. But sometimes those staff will decide an issue is too benign or obviously doomed to bother their boss with. “A lot of things try to get hotlined every day,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan (who, when asked if he knew the move was coming, did not explicitly answer but said, “you know, it wasn’t, like, my highest priority in the US Senate”).

This system raises the question: If any senator can pass a bill on any day, why aren’t people trying this all the time? Why doesn’t Sen. Bernie Sanders slip into the Senate when no Republicans are around and use unanimous consent to pass the Green New Deal? Why doesn’t Sen. Ted Cruz wait until Democrats are eating lunch and then single-handedly repeal Obamacare? Why doesn’t Sen. Chuck Schumer make Tide pods look less delicious?

“Since I’ve been here I’ve asked that same question,” said Republican Sen. Mike Braun, who began representing Indiana in the Senate in 2019.

“Why couldn’t you just do a sneak attack when nobody was looking? That’s a courtesy of the Senate, where that doesn’t happen,” he said.

The long-standing hotline system of notifying every senator of each unanimous consent request isn’t just a matter of principle. The moment this norm is breached and one side tries something sneaky, both parties would need to implement a system where one of their members is present in the Senate chamber at all times to block consent requests. That’s a babysitting duty no one wants to be stuck with, so both sides agree to play nice.

A sneaky consent request would also be far from guaranteed to succeed. Every bill needs to pass both the Senate and the House, as well as go to the president’s desk, in order to become law.

“Remember, it’s a circuitous, drawn-out process here in general,” Braun said. “The only time that would really make a difference is if you snuck it through and it was a slam dunk in the other chamber and with the president.”

The permanent daylight saving time bill is now in this limbo. Though it has passed the Senate, it still needs to pass the House and be signed into law by President Joe Biden. Passing a bill through the House is generally a lot easier than the Senate, but there is still an opportunity for standard time proponents — or clock-changing enthusiasts — to block the legislation.

One person said by a Senate source to be pushing the House to do exactly that is Tom Cotton. Cotton’s office did not comment.