Today, Explained - Permanent daylight saving time?

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

A bill to make daylight saving time permanent slipped through the Senate. Now, the real fight for time begins. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Something very strange happened in the Senate a few days ago. I've covered the Senate for a few years now, and you get intimately familiar with all of the various ways that it is dysfunctional and broken. So when something actually passed on a random Tuesday afternoon that people care about, I was immediately suspicious. Paul McLeod is a reporter with BuzzFeed News. And so I started looking into it and found exactly what I expected, which is that something kind of had gone wrong.

And that, in fact, many senators that I talked to last week had no idea that this was about to happen until it was already done. In case you didn't hear, the United States Senate unanimously decided to make daylight saving time permanent. How that happened, and whether or not it's a terrible idea, ahead on Today Explained. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Day! Day! Today Explained, Daylight Saving, Paul McLeod, BuzzFeed News. In order to talk about what made this daylight saving situation so strange, we had to start with how the Senate usually works, how a bill usually gets passed.

I'm just a bill. Yes, I'm only a bill. So the schoolhouse rock version is that it gets studied, and then it goes for debate, and then you have some votes, and this is where we get the infamous filibuster, where unless you can get 60 senators on board, you're not going to be able to pass it through the Senate. Suffice to say that it's a pretty painful process, and it's pretty difficult to get anything through the Senate. That's why so many bills that are passed by the House just languish and die. It's not easy to become a law, is it? No. It's a high bar to get something through the Senate. But there is this sort of side route,

this workaround, where in Senate rules you can essentially do anything as long as every senator agrees unanimously that it's fine. So what people will often do is they'll go to the floor of the Senate and say, I would like unanimous consent to pass this bill that's very important for me. Unanimous consent? Unanimous consent is kind of a loophole. Basically, if you can get every senator to agree to waive the rules, you can do pretty much anything. You can take a bill and pass it in 30 seconds.

How do you throw it out there? Does someone like ring an alarm and say, we're shooting for unanimous consent now? Right. Yeah. Like it's like the I declare bankruptcy Michael Scott thing. I declare bankruptcy! That actually is sort of how it works. So the key is that there's a negative onus. You don't need all 100 senators to say, yes, I agree. You ask if anyone disagrees. And all it takes is one person to say, I disagree. So what you do is you reach out to the 99 other senators, your office does, and you let them know what you're going to try to ask consent for. You let them know when it's going to happen.

And every one of them has the opportunity to say, yeah, sure, go for it, or no, I object. And this is what's called a hotline. A hotline. Hotline, yeah. Senators are always trying to advance their own issues. And this is how every other senator has a chance to say yes or no. Usually what happens is if you say no, if you say I actually don't agree with that, or even I think that needs more study, I'm not ready. It's called putting a hold on the bill.

Literally, it just means you're holding it up. And at that point, if the original senator still goes to the floor of the Senate to try to push it, they'll tell you exactly when. And you get the opportunity to go and say, nope, I block consent and shut it all down. I think a lot of people wonder at this point, well, why don't senators just sneak into the chamber when no one else is around and ask for consent for whatever issue and then no one's there to object and then boom, Bob's your uncle and you just passed universal health care or something to the Senate. I want to again thank you for your support. The reason for that, it's twofold. One, it's the long-standing tradition of the Senate that out of courtesy and respect and

institutional legitimacy, you give every other senator a chance to be notified so that unanimous consent is actually unanimous. The more down-and-dirty practical reason is that the moment someone tries to sneak something through the Senate with unanimous consent, both parties are going to institute a system where you've got to have babysitters. You've got senators sitting on the floor every day just to block any requests defensively. And no senator wants to do that. These are people who like to be out fundraising and making announcements and holding press conferences and all of these things. And they do not want to be stuck for hours on end in the Senate on defense. So what exactly happened with daylight saving time last Tuesday? So it started

off like anything else. Marco Rubio wants to pass this bill to make daylight saving time permanent. Switching in and out of daylight savings time is outdated and it's only a source of annoyance and confusion. Frankly, it's just dumb and there's just no other way to say it. He runs a hotline. Sure enough, he gets a hold on his bill. This guy, Roger Wicker, who's a senator representing Mississippi, says, I don't agree with that. And actually, Wicker couldn't get there.

His flight was delayed. So Rubio, per this grand agreement they all adhere to, moves it to Tuesday so that Wicker can be there. He can block unanimous consent. Except that when Rubio hit the floor of the Senate and asks, Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the Rubio substitute amendment at the desk be considered and agreed to, the bill as amended be considered right a third time and passed, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table. Is there objection?

No one said anything. Without objection, so ordered. Wicker didn't object to it. Hmm. Now, Wicker later told me that he was focused on other issues such as the war in Ukraine and gas prices, and he just decided, because his colleagues cared about this, that he was not going to stand in the way and he was not going to be the one to block it.

Whether that's true or whether he just got caught in traffic, I don't know. But one way or another, he did not object. And then no one else did. And what I found out later was that a lot of other people, potentially some senators who might have objected, had no idea it was even happening. And one senator in particular, I was told by someone who would know, was pretty angry about this and did want to object and did want to block permanent daylight savings time. This is Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a Republican senator. He apparently is opposed, but his staff, I am told, didn't tell him about it.

So he didn't know it was happening until it was too late. Wait, wait, his staff didn't tell him because they wanted it to pass? Well, probably not. Cotton and his staff wouldn't talk to me. But I talked to other senators who were also not told by their staff. And what they said is that it wasn't malicious or sneaky. It's just that they have a lot of issues crossing their desk every day. And staff have to make judgment calls. I talked to Senator Chris Coons of Delaware who said, or sneaky. It's just that they have a lot of issues crossing their desk every day, and staff

have to make judgment calls. I talked to the Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, who said, my staff didn't tell me because they made the assumption that I don't care about daylight savings time. He says, and in fairness, I don't know if I do. I don't know if I have a position on it. So you're saying that we shouldn't take unanimous consent on making daylight saving permanent as a sign that there is unanimity in the United States Senate, we should take it as no one cared enough to object? That's exactly right. And in fact, it's definitely not unanimous. I'm pretty sure there are some senators who oppose it and would have blocked it if they had thought about it. Like no one's trying to call it back. No, no,

well, you can't. I mean, there's nothing you can do. It's passed the Senate. So now the way you would block it is you would, if you're a senator, is you call up your friends in the House of Representatives and you say, look, I messed up. You guys need to try to stop this. But it's a lot harder to stop something from passing the House than it is the Senate. Things pass the House all the time. I don't know whether they're going to pass permanent daylight savings time. There was a hearing in the House on it, and it didn't have the normal stark Republican versus Democrat partisan divide. A lot of people seem genuinely curious. There's sort of a willingness amongst both parties

broadly, I think, to at least hear it out. The changing of our clocks has impacts on our health and our economy, which begs the question, do we still need to spring forward or fall back in the first place? And it's a question that many of us ask every time we have to do it. Of course, at some point in this schoolhouse rock, the thing goes to the president. Has he weighed in on this in the intervening week? The White House has essentially said, look, we don't know. We don't even know what our position on this is yet. Wow. No one expected this. This doesn't happen. Amazing. You said this story was stupid. It's not that stupid. It's interesting.

No, it's very interesting because I think people don't realize how the Senate actually works. So getting back to that schoolhouse rock idea. It's kind of antiquated, to be honest. Really, how a bill becomes a law is more likely that you will have all of the key party leaders meeting behind closed doors negotiating, let's say, a big spending package. And you have them and the White House going back and forth, ironing out all the rules, and they'll take this deal they agree to, and they'll literally copy and paste it onto, let's say, some bill that originally renamed a post office, something like that. They put in the text, and then they pass it, and that's how a bill becomes law. And so they use unanimous consent a lot as part of the machinery of the Senate. And this is why if you ever see, let's say, a story about Senator

Rand Paul is threatening to shut down the government or hold up some sort of big piece of legislation, the reason that one senator can hold up a piece of legislation that is theoretically going to be decided by a majority is that unanimous consent is woven into how the Senate works. And all it takes is one person to block unanimous consent and the procedure grinds to a halt. So we've actually created this institution that is very vulnerable to vandalism. And that's why it's so vulnerable to big, important pieces of legislation being held up. And that's why we have things like government shutdowns that last five days. They couldn't get unanimous consent. Do you think unanimous consent being used for something this

significant that it sounds like so many senators just straight up missed was even happening might change the way the Senate uses unanimous consent? Well, I think it's probably the opposite. I think that the success of this daylight saving time bill is going to go down as a historical outlier. I can only imagine that a lot of Senate offices right now are having the conversation of, you know what, we need to talk about these things more. We need to make sure our boss knows every single one. We need to make sure that something else doesn't slip by as this one does.

Because, you know, Senators want to be able to throw their weight around. They want to be able to exert their influence. And getting up and blocking unanimous consent is one of the tools they have to do that. So I don't know how replicable this strategy is. I think Rubio kind of just got really lucky. Picking away the moments that make up a dull day. Fridger and waste the hours in an offhand way. Picking around on a piece of ground in your hometown. Waiting for someone or something to show you the frame. When you give an aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an

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With iGaming Ontario. All right, we're back. It's Today Light Saving Explained, and it's now time to talk through the merits of the Senate's nicely named Sunshine Protection Act, the move to make daylight saving permanent. I don't personally really have a dog in this fight, but we found two people who do. First, someone who's for it. Hey, yes. So I'm Brian Resnick. I am a science reporter and science editor of the Unexplainable podcast. And second, someone who isn't. I'm Josh Barrow. I write the Very Serious newsletter at joshbarrow.com. I also host a podcast called Very Serious.

The officials are ready. The fighters are in the ring. write the Very Serious newsletter at joshbarrow.com. I also host a podcast called Very Serious. The officials are ready. The fighters are in the ring. Gentlemen, if you could shake hands virtually, that'd be great. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to run. Brian, you wrote an article for Vox arguing this Senate initiative to make daylight saving permanent is a good thing. What is your argument? So the argument is less that we should keep standard time or keep daylight savings time.

The argument is for consistency. And it's grounded in the science of chronobiology, that it's just very simply put, when we have these sudden changes of time, we're basically putting people into a state of jet lag, which is just an unnecessary disruption and could cause negative either immediate or possibly even contribute to longer-term health effects. When we spring forward in the spring, there's kind of two things that happen. One is you lose an hour of sleep, which impacts like your attention and your focus, but you also get shifted. Your body is a clock and, you know, you have this circadian rhythm that tries to anticipate when things will happen to your body. So, you know, at a certain time in the morning, your body starts to produce a lot of cortisol to get you to be alert and attentive in the early morning. And if you just like get misaligned, then you like misalign like where you are physically in the day with like what your brain is ready for. There are some consequences of that. Like one, like just general jet lag is bad for you. This form of jet lag they call social jet lag because

you're not actually traveling, but it's happening. It kind of messes with your metabolism. It messes with your kind of sugar processing. It could potentially contribute to weight gain later, you know, if it's like really intense and it keeps going. And then there have been some studies that find like in that daylight saving time jump in the spring that after that there are increased accidents, increased heart attacks, increased just like calamities of drowsiness afterwards. People actually die because of the springing forward. I don't think like there's any death certificate that says this person died due to saving time, but there have been some studies that looked at at the increased amount of traffic accidents, work accidents, and other such calamities on the day after.

Especially in the spring, because in the spring you have that double whammy of losing sleep and also getting into this minor state of jet lag. Josh, Bryant says the Sunshine Protection Act permanent DST is healthy. You've written that permanent DST is stupid, even though apparently springing forward can literally kill you. What's your argument? Well, first of all, one thing that a lot of people should know that they don't know when debating this is that we've already done this before. In 1974, we had a law that created permanent daylight saving time. And so we started

that in the winter of 1974. And what happened was that people absolutely hated it. They hated that the sun rose so late. When you have this policy, you get really late sunrises, especially depending exactly where you are on the map. You get sunrise at 9.01 a.m. in Detroit, you get sunrise at 8.57 a.m. in Seattle. Even in New York, which doesn't have a particularly extreme position within a time zone, you'd still get sunrise as late as 8.20 a.m. That means people going to school in the dark, people going to work in the dark. And yes, some of the complaints are claims about that causes car accidents and it's unsafe. But the main problem with that is just that it's really unpleasant to have to drag yourself out of bed in the morning before the sun is up. And when you set the clock that way, so that you have daylight saving time all year, you get majorities of the public that needs to

be up before the sun. And that's unpleasant. We have this policy of shifting the clocks twice a year, so that approximately more or less, we can make it so that people tend to wake up a little bit after sunrise. It means they don't have to drag themselves out of bed in the dark. And it means to the extent we have daylight hours available, they're put at a time that's useful at the end of the day. Now, in the winter, you can't do that as much as you can in the summer. I think a lot of what people want here is they would just like more daylight hours in the winter, but that's impossible. So what we have to balance here is tens of millions, hundreds of millions of Americans having to drag themselves out of bed in the dark in the morning if you make this a permanent daylight saving time policy, which is why it was soundly rejected when

we tried it in 1974. It was supposed to be a two-year experiment with permanent daylight saving. It lasted less than a year. The House voted 383 to 16 to repeal the permanent daylight saving law just months after it went into effect because people hated it so much. And I think that would be what you see again if we do it now. People like getting up shortly after sunrise and they like having as much daylight as possible during the day. That's what we have as a policy now. And if you change that, you're just f***ing with that. Oh, if there's something I agree here is that, yes, winter is probably brutal no matter what. I think that's right, that ultimately what we want is more daylight, but that's impossible because, you know. That's the axial tilt of the earth.

Yes, yes. So we don't get that. I think there's also a case for keeping standard time permanent, too. Aha. So for people who haven't considered this, Brian, what would making standard time permanent look like? Yeah, so standard time would be the time we have in the winter currently. that would address some of the problem of keeping daylight savings time extended all year round, like if you don't like those kind of very late in the morning sunrises. I feel like I'm kind of agnostic on the keep daylight savings time or keep standard time. Just keep time consistent seems like a good idea. One of the problems with the policy right now is that it just doesn't make as much sense in different places. So the farther south you go towards the equator,

the less differential there is going to be between daylight hours in the summer and winter. And then if we just keep standard time, there's also always the option of just starting work earlier in the summer, which maybe is hard to do on a society level. But, you know, hopefully we could make that happen on like a local by local level. Josh, I heard you let out a sigh back there. Yeah, because it's just reverse engineering daylight saving time. People say, oh, well, you know, well, you can get up earlier. You can change your schedule. And that's true, except we're all attached to institutions, to employers, to schools, and that sort of thing. And so how annoying would it be

if your workplace moves its calendar by half an hour, three weeks before your kid's school moves it by an hour? Now, maybe you'd want a coordinating public policy so everyone makes those moves at once. But that's what daylight saving time is. By moving the clock, we agree that everybody's going to move their schedule for the summer. When people say that, I think it's just an admission that daylight saving time really is good on a seasonal basis when you have it in the summer. Because if you had permanent standard time, to your point, yes, you wouldn't have those super late sunrises in the winter, but what you would have is sunrise at 4.24 a.m. in New York in June, which is too early to be useful. People are not up that early.

I have a question, though. One thing that does not seem to be on the table here. Why don't we just spring forward on the Friday to the Saturday instead of the Saturday to the Sunday so that we're a little more adjusted by the time that Monday comes around? Would that make people more amenable

to this change every spring? I mean, people have this quasi-joking thing where they say spring forward should happen at 4 p.m. on a Friday. Yeah. The time is set up originally, I think, to like screw with actual ongoing schedules as little as possible. Yeah. You know, if it was in the middle of the day, people would have a business meeting. And like when you fall back, is it like, is it the first two o'clock or the second two o'clock, that sort of thing. So doing it in the middle of the night is mostly a logistical thing i guess very early on saturday instead of very early on sunday i don't see what the problem with that would be um but it sort of has to be at a time when most people are asleep i wonder if there's like working towards

like an idea of reconciliation here you know there are some states that don't participate in this system, like Arizona and I believe Hawaii. If the idea is that the reality of sunrise and time is different at different latitudes, does it make more sense for a very northern state to keep some form of daylight saving time switches and more southern states to more southern states to, you know, I think in Florida, where this bill came from, it probably makes less sense for there to be these, you know, sudden changes in time because, you know, the daylight hours don't like swing as much as they do in, you know, Minnesota. Yeah, I mean, that's why Hawaii doesn't observe daylight saving time. It's so much farther south than other states. I would not have a problem with letting Florida opt out of daylight saving time. I think that would be a fine outcome for Florida, except that then for much of the year,

Florida would not be in the same time zone as New York and Washington, D.C. and Atlanta and other various major eastern markets. That's part of why we have the system we have now. But if Florida wanted to opt out of it, I would not have a problem with that. I think you guys have given us a lot to think about. I would say I am convinced of a couple of things from this conversation. One, we should do it on Friday night. You're convinced of your own proposal. That's great.

Yes. And that we should let Florida do whatever it wants to do as we so often do in life. Doesn't Florida just do that anyway, generally? Where do you stand on daylight saving time? Did you even know it's daylight saving time and not savings? Let us know. Today Explained at Vox.com. I'm Sean Ramos. And this has been today's show.

Wouldn't have been possible without Miles Bryan, Matthew Collette, Laura Bullard, Afim Shapiro, and Chris Martin.