Comment: What Senate’s time change vote says about Congress

Published 1:30 am Saturday, March 19, 2022

By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion

The U.S. Senate’s run of legislative productivity continued on Tuesday with the surprise passage of a bill to make daylight saving time a year-round thing.

Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican, asked for unanimous consent to pass the bipartisan bill, no one objected, and boom: The bill passed. It now goes to the House of Representatives, and no one knows what will happen there because no one expected the Senate to act so quickly. Or at all.

For those who support ending the biannual time-change ritual, a stand-alone Senate effort was probably ideal. Had President Joe Biden proposed it, the parties would probably have retreated to their corners. Republican voters would have tended to move against the idea, and at least some congressional Republicans would have followed them; either because they were listening to their constituents or because they would want to deny Biden a win or just because they would figure it must be a bad idea if Biden liked it. (The same would probably have happened with Democratic voters and Democratic politicians had President Donald Trump or President George W. Bush proposed permanent daylight saving time when they were in the White House).

And better the Senate than the House. Opposition to extending daylight saving time has generally been especially intense among rural Americans, who have more clout in the Senate, so now it’s possible that the most difficult part of the fight has been accomplished.

There is some danger for politicians. Messing with the clocks is something voters are apt to notice. When year-round daylight saving time was tried back in the 1970s in the name of saving energy, people turned against dark winter mornings and successfully pushed to end it. Still, states could opt for year-round standard time (as Hawaii and most of Arizona have done for decades), or designate some areas within the state to do so. Perhaps that would help avoid places where sunrise would be especially late.

Two changes since the 1970s may make permanent daylight saving more successful if it gets another chance. For one thing, there’s been a steady rural population decline, among farmers in particular, thus depriving standard time of its most loyal constituency. But the big change that may make winter daylight saving viable is that most kids no longer walk to school. The numbers are difficult to pin down, but at least one widely cited figure estimates that about half of kids walked or biked to school in 1969 — just a few years before the first national experiment in year-round daylight saving — while now it’s fewer than one-fifth, and perhaps even below 1 in 10.

High-profile accidents involving schoolchildren were the biggest source of problems in that 1973-74 experiment. There may not have actually been a net increase in accidents, but the news media’s bias is always going to be to highlight trouble, not to note the absence of trouble (such as if there were fewer afternoon accidents). Perhaps a handful of similar incidents would derail another attempt at it, but with fewer kids walking or biking to school, high-profile cases may not scare parents as much. Perhaps.

Anyway, momentum has been building within the states for this change for the last several years, and apparently the Senate was listening. It’s hard to know how well proponents have thought through the downside. Several people on Twitter, for example, suggested that school starting in the dark shouldn’t be a problem because localities could just change the school day; something that might be a good idea in the abstract, but could also cause a massive disruption in many families’ daily routines, as well as perhaps straining the resources of a lot of school districts.

Senate passage will alert any interest groups that oppose the switch, and they’ll push for the House to take it slow, to hold hearings and perhaps to amend the bill. That’s how Congress usually works. It’s not guaranteed to address everyone’s strongest objections, but it’s a pretty good system for bringing them to lawmakers’ attention.

Senate passage is also a good reminder that while the U.S. system is famous for having a multiplicity of veto points — House, Senate, president, courts, and more — it also has an enormous number of initiation points, which is highly unusual by world standards. If any of the 100 senators wants something, he or she can get it on the agenda, and sometimes get it enacted into law, even without strong support from either political party or from the White House. It’s not quite as easy on the House side, especially for members who aren’t on the relevant committee, but it still does happen sometimes.

To me it’s a strength of the Madisonian system that it gives more political actors an opportunity for meaningful participation. Others might note that it also gives narrow interests a way to affect public policy without broad-based support. Strength or not, it is certainly unusual.

Jonathan Bernstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He taught political science at the University of Texas at San Antonio and DePauw University and wrote A Plain Blog About Politics.