ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The Sunshine Protection Act sailed through the U.S. Senate last week, much to the surprise of, well, just about everybody.
Republican Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who has long fought for the change, introduced the bill which would “lock the clock” by placing the entire nation on permanent daylight saving time.
“I know this is not the most important issue confronting America, but it's one of those issues where there's a lot of agreement,” Rubio said last Tuesday on the Senate floor.
His comments, and the bill, went unchallenged.
The bill received unanimous, bipartisan support, but not through a roll-call vote.
That’s because it didn’t get a vote at all. It didn’t follow the typical route a bill would usually take – working through committees and debate before being brought to the floor.
Instead it passed on what’s known as unanimous consent, a quirky parliamentary procedure that any senator can use to easily and quickly pass a bill without a formal vote.
Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies at the nonprofit Brookings Institution, explained it’s a procedure that was invented to help speed up business on more routine or non-controversial issues.
“Because they’re so complicated and slow-moving, the Senate has kind of developed a little bit of a workaround,” she said.
But it can only work if no other senator objects, or cares to object, or – possibly in this case – knew they needed to object.
Reynolds says the process requires all senators be notified ahead of time about a colleague’s request for unanimous consent.
“If there is something that Senate leaders are going to try and move this way and use unanimous consent they put a call out to all of the senators’ offices,” Reynolds said, “and senators have a certain amount of time to say ‘no I don’t want this to proceed this way.’”
However, Reynold said, lawmakers might not always get the message.
“Because actually getting the information to the senator about what’s on the schedule for this involves other humans, sometimes we can see things like what appears to have happened with this daylight saving time bill,” she explained. “Sometimes wires get crossed, or you make a judgement about what you think you need to tell your boss and sometimes you’re wrong.”
In fact, Buzzfeed reported some senators weren’t told by their staff about the request, deemed too insignificant to relay.
What keeps this procedure from being abused, Reynolds said, is the alternative – that senators would have to constantly be on the floor and ready to object. For now, at least, that’s something the majority agree isn’t worth their time.
In the meantime, the sudden surprising passage of the bill in the Senate might’ve been short-lived.
The House appears to be locking the clock on any immediate push to make daylight saving time permanent.
The chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee – which oversees time change policy – told the Washington Post it could be weeks, or even months, before it’s brought to a full vote in that chamber.
That’s partly because that committee has been waiting for several years for the findings of federal analysis on the costs and benefits of eliminating the time change.