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“A lot of things try to get hotlined every day,” said Sen. But sometimes those staff will decide an issue is too benign or obviously doomed to bother their boss with. “And I don’t know if I do! I’ve never taken five minutes to stop and think about it.”ĭuring a hotline, a senator’s legislative director typically vets the request. “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. 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.
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Other senators, it seems, were not told by their staff that the request was happening.Ĭoons is one of them. I’m more interested in fighting other battles,” he said. 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. The consent request was bumped to Tuesday so that Wicker could block it, but he never did. Roger Wicker had placed a hold on it and his flight was delayed. Marco Rubio said he initially planned to bring up the daylight saving bill Monday, but Sen.
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At that point, if you push the bill forward to the Senate floor, you’re likely doing it for the TV footage of you valiantly trying your best and being stymied by a mean colleague. Those senators can then place a “hold” on the bill (saying they refuse consent). The convention is that a senator will first “hotline” their bill, notifying every single senator of their plan. Senators ask for unanimous consent all the time but it’s usually just for show. But all it takes is a single senator to object and the bill is blocked. Any senator can go to the Senate floor any time and ask for unanimous consent to skip all of the debate and the votes and just pass the bill immediately. With unanimous agreement, you can do pretty much anything. In the lucky event that your bill does move forward, you need to win over at least 60 of 100 senators, then go through hours of debate and multiple rounds of votes. They will tell you no because Senate floor time is in high demand and they are too busy confirming judges and keeping the government funded to spend hours on your bill. Typically, to pass a bill you need to first clear it through a Senate committee, and then you need to ask the Senate majority leader to put it to a vote. Passing a bill through the chamber is, by design, a long and painful process that usually results in shattered dreams and bitter failure. This is not how the Senate usually works. “No comment,” Cotton told BuzzFeed News when asked why he didn’t object to the bill.
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The source said that Cotton would have objected to the unanimous consent request, but his staff never told him it was happening. “No comment,” Cotton told BuzzFeed News when asked if he opposed the bill. Tom Cotton vehemently opposes making daylight saving time permanent. One Senate source with knowledge of the situation said Sen.
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Chris Coons issued a series of shocked stammers that is impossible to phonetically translate. Asked to re-create his reaction to the news, Sen. Rick Scott, a permanent daylight saving time proponent who signed a similar bill into law when he was governor of Florida, said he would have gone to give a speech on the Senate floor if he had known.
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“I was surprised that someone didn’t object,” she told BuzzFeed News the next day, while noting that Arizona does not change its clocks, “because we’re smart.”Īny single senator could have blocked the daylight saving bill from passing but many didn’t know it was even happening. Kyrsten Sinema, serving as Senate chair overseeing the motion at the time, broke composure, burst into a grin, and whispered, “Yes!” Reporters and politicos were caught off guard Tuesday afternoon when the Sunshine Protection Act sailed through the Senate without issue, with no senators speaking up to object to it passing by unanimous consent. Tom Cotton’s office may result in an overhaul in the nation’s time zones. In a twist the Founding Fathers likely did not anticipate, quirky Senate conventions and a decision by staff in Sen. WASHINGTON - The Senate’s unanimous passage of a bill to make daylight saving time permanent stunned many Americans, not least of which the senators themselves.
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