January 2019

Do not take New Hampshire’s plan to fix DST for granite!

January 20, 2019

OK, sorry. The headline is a small play on the fact that New Hampshire is the Granite State.

I am a huge fan of New Hampshire. My most famous relative lived there for decades, and donated her home and some acreage to the state, and it is now a lovely and quaint state park.

Our children will have more time after school to hike the Shieling Forest in Peterborough
if we have Daylight Time year-round. Photo from this FB Group.

My relative was Elizabeth Yates, the writer. She wrote dozens of books in her 95 years, the most famous of which was Amos Fortune, Free Man.

She wrote that book after being inspired by a headstone she discovered on a walk through Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It read:

Sacred
to the memory of
Amos Fortune
who was born free in
Africa a slave in America
he purchased liberty
professed Christianity
lived reputably and
died hopefully
Nov. 17, 1801
Aet. 91

With just that, she went to the state librarian in Concord and researched as much as she could about him, and then wrote a piece of historical fiction that was so lyrical, touching and powerful that it was awarded the top U.S. prize for youth fiction, the Newbery Medal for 1951.

A slave to the clock?

What does this have to do with Daylight Saving Time?

Perhaps just this: As the saying goes, “The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.”

I wouldn’t presume to say that fixing daylight saving time is the most important social justice issue of our time, or the most significant freedom and states-rights topic of the day… but it is a real issue.

It wasn’t, of course, in Amos Fortune’s day. Clocks back then were set to a town clock, and that was set by someone in the town figuring out when the sun was most straight overhead.

After the train came through, train conductors wanted synchronized time, so the Department of Transportation took over the regulation of time, and does so to this day.

When my great aunt Elizabeth Yates was a small girl, there was no DST, just Eastern Time. When we entered W.W. I, we started switching the clocks twice a year to stay in synch with the Brits, who themselves did it to stay in synch with the Germans. Why the Germans did it is a matter of some controversy.

As a country we Locked The Clock as soon as the war was over, and then we started switching twice a year again in W.W. II.

(Notice that “The Farmers” are not part of that history. They were not, and never have been and anyone who says they are is just repeating fake news.)

Why are we talking about DST?

Life in New Hampshire is just so much better than it was in the old days. People aren’t enslaved, and don’t have to purchase their own freedom. If you get influenza, you probably won’t die — that wasn’t the case 100 years ago.

So the things that we have to fix these days seem, perhaps, a bit prosaic, compared to the days when we did things like send a teacher into space, as we did with the great New Hampshire citizen Christa McAuliffe, God rest her soul.

But historians like Ken Burns of New Hampshire know that sometimes even small things can mean a lot.

So, what is this small thing we are fixing?

It’s the clock. Twice a year the government makes us change it. Why? It really isn’t the farmers. We change it, basically, because that is what we have done for as long as most people alive can remember.

And while it won’t save as many lives as George Whipple, (born in Grafton County, he’s the guy who figured out how to keep people from dying from anemia) fixing DST will save lives.

How? The research is very clear that the spring-forward change is deadly.

In a state as far north as New Hampshire, jolting an entire populace awake an hour before their bodies are ready for it causes traffic accidents, heart attacks, strokes, epileptic seizures, workplace accidents. Even judges are more harsh in their sentencing.

Worried about school kids going to school in the dark? Well, kids don’t die from that, and if the legislature wants to take up the idea of starting school a bit later, I’m sure you’ll have kids and families fully behind you.

The thing we actually need to be worried about these days is childhood obesity. The experts there tell us that another hour of daylight after school gives kids that much more time to play outside, not sitting inside looking at a device.

Regarding House Bill 567

Now, it is the case that it would be pretty disruptive for New Hampshire to be out of synch with Massachusetts and Maine. That’s why the bill being considered now smartly is following the trend of other bills around the country that say states should move as a group.

It’s very good planning to pass this measure right now. I hate to be the one to point this out, but Massachusetts may not be as neighborly, and could just pass a bill to #LockTheClock and not pay attention to if other nearby states are going to do it or not.

If New Hampshire passes this bill right now, you’ll know that you’ll be set if your noisy neighbor to the south takes action.

And there’s a good chance Massachusetts will act. They performed an excellent service for the whole country by really researching the topic in depth. The report they issued after interviews with the best experts is that staying on Daylight Time year-round is the best overall for everyone.

The panel also recommended that Massachusetts move to year-round DST in coordination with other New England states, but that could just end up being Connecticut and Rhode Island.

So this bill is the exact right solution at the exact right time.

Passing this bill will follow in the tradition of my great aunt, Amos Fortune, and so many other great residents of New Hampshire to lead on an important issue, and not just wait for the rest of the New England states to act first and then play catch-up.

New Hampshire has a proud tradition of going first in the nation with the primaries. Passing this bill will give New Hampshire a chance to also go first in bringing some sanity to the government’s mandate of us moving the clock around twice a year.

If you’d like to be a part of history, come to the hearing on Wednesday!

Daylight Saving Time and the 2019 Legislative Sessions

January 13, 2019

This is the fifth legislative session that I’ve been paying attention to the Daylight Saving Time issue, and I can tell already that this one is going to be huge.

Photo by David Hertle on Unsplash

The quality and thoughtfulness of the bills is great, and the quantity seems much greater for the first couple weeks of January than I can ever remember.

To what do we owe this surge?

The overwhelming victory in California was certainly part of it. The vote was technical, obtuse, and didn’t offer immediate relief from clock-changing madness, and still it passed with more than 60 percent of the vote. I give credit to the farmers and the housewives. 😉
Also perhaps is the moves the European Union is making to scrap what they call “Summer Time.”
And it may have been Florida, which passed into law the notion that if the feds ever fix the national law, Florida would very much like to just move to permanent DST. One of the U.S. Senators from that state, wanting to catch up to the people he’s leading, immediately said that he would try to fix the federal law. So far all we’ve seen on that front is a press release, but at least that’s more than we had before!
(I’ve decided not to grumble too much that the research in the press release from Rubio’s office shares more than just a passing resemblance to the research page on my site. A thank you card might have been nice.)

Other than that, there’s no single thing. The notion that we should #LockTheClock is just catching on.

Legislation getting smarter

And legislators are getting smarter about how to pass bills. For instance, in Wyoming and Connecticut, legislators are proposing that they go to permanent Daylight Saving time (which, for reasons that have to do with the intractability of federal law, involve moving themselves one time zone to the east and then declaring themselves on Standard time year round.) But both of those bills say their state should do it only if neighboring states join in. That’s a solid idea that has been floated around the country before, and may help those bills get passed.

New Mexico had come very close to passing a really smart bill that would have done things properly, but that bill died an ignoble death. I saw it, it wasn’t pretty.

As a guy who’s been working this issue for a long time now, I have some institutional history. So one of the things I need to do is try to contact the sponsor of the new bill in New Mexico, a guy named Bobby Gonzales, and encourage him to talk to Cliff Pirtle. They are in opposite chambers and opposing parties, but if there ever was an issue that is nonpartisan, it’s this one.

Maybe Bobby can do what Cliff could not do, in spite of his truly amazing beard, and that is to convince Gail Chasey that fixing DST is not some Nixonian plot, as she currently thinks it is.

(Yes, it will make you cynical, but one person really can thwart the will of the people, and in New Mexico that one person is Gail Chasey.)

Working together, we can make this work

If you are a legislator with a Daylight Saving Time bill, or if you are just thinking about one, drop me a line. I’m happy to talk to you privately, to come and testify, to do whatever it takes to help you.

Although there are not a lot of lobbyists working on this issue, there are a few that can crop up, especially from the golf industry. I can let you know what their interests are, and how you can work with them so they won’t fight you, and instead work to help you.

…

If you are a citizen, why not contact your local legislator? They always love hearing from real constituents. Well, almost always. They for sure will like it on this issue.

If you aren’t sure who that is, just look them up here. Then contact them and say that you really don’t think we should be changing the clocks twice a year for a bunch of reasons backed by research.

If you do that, and get a good response, let me know about it and I’ll highlight it on this blog.

If you happen to live in a state that has a bill on DST working this year (you can find them here) then for sure contact your own legislators AND the sponsors, and tell them how glad you are they are working on a bill to fix this.

And one word of advice: Let’s say the bill in your state is to move the state permanently to standard time, and not daylight time as you’d prefer. I say that you should still support that bill because if we can make ANY change, we can show that change can happen. Let’s get the ball rolling on change first, and then get it exactly right after that.

Thanks for joining me on this journey!

Can The Founding Fathers Fix Daylight Saving Time?

January 3, 2019

Editor’s note: Today we hear from a guest author, someone who contacted me asking about the 10th Amendment implications of Daylight Saving Time. It was immediately clear that he knew more about this than me, so I asked him to write this post. I hope you find it as helpful as I did. – Scott

Many of us were taught in school that the federal government is the top of the authority hierarchy with the states next in line, and finally city and county government at the bottom. This simplified view of things likely comes from a phrase in the U.S. Constitution often referred to as the supremacy clause. Article VI, clause 2 of the Constitution reads, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.”

The key words that many people overlook are, “…which shall be made in Pursuance thereof…” So, only laws made in pursuance of, or consistent with, the Constitution are the supreme law of the land.

The 10th Amendment makes it clear that the federal government’s authority is described in its entirety within the Constitution and that anything not included there remains the province of the the states and the people: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

The federal government is, therefore, one of enumerated powers—it may exercise control over only those matters that the states and the people have explicitly delegated to it.

We all know that’s not the practical reality of 21st century America. The federal government does thousands of things everyday it has not been granted authority to do. The usual response is to bring a law suit and have the courts decide whether a law is legitimate but think about that for a moment—why would the people, who have delegated limited authority to the federal government, turn to that same government to ask if what it is doing is OK? It’s like asking your children to “interpret” their own bed time!

The U.S. Constitution does not delegate authority to the federal government to regulate time but that didn’t stop Congress from passing a variety of laws governing how we set our clocks, including the Uniform Time Act of 1966 and the Standard Time Act of 1918.

Since these laws purport to govern something that is outside of Congressional authority, does that invalidate them? According to U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803), “…an act of the legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void.”

What would happen if a state or group of states decided that they did not want to use daylight savings time? Or decided to use it year-round? What recourse would the federal government have? Even if it went to court to try to force those states to comply with the Uniform Time Act how could such a decision be enforced?

It turns out the Supreme Court has already weighed in on the issue, albeit indirectly. In no fewer than four decisions, the Court has made it clear the the federal government cannot force states to carry out a federal law. The federal government has to enforce its own laws since the resources of the states cannot be “commandeered” by the federal government to execute its laws, a legal concept that has become known as the “anti-commandeering principle.”

In the case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), Justice Joseph Story held that the federal government could not force states to implement the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. In New York v. United States (1992), [regarding hazardous waste regulations] Sandra Day O’Conner wrote for the majority: “…Congress may not simply commandee[r] the legislative processes of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.”

In Printz v. United States (1997), sheriffs Jay Printz and Richard Mack sued over implementation of the Brady background checks; the court held, “The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program…such commands are fundamentally incompatible with our constitutional system of dual sovereignty.” And in Independent Business v. Sebelius (2012), the Court held that the federal government cannot force the states to act against their will by withholding funds in a coercive manner. Chief Justice John Roberts argued that allowing Congress to essentially punish states that refused to go along violates the constitutional separation of powers.

So where does all this leave us with respect to daylight savings time? Since the federal government has no authority to regulate the measurement of time and it cannot force the states to carry out federal laws, the states simply need to, in the words of the principle author of the Constitution, James Madison, “refuse to cooperate with officers of the union.” Stop changing time twice a year. It’s that simple. Do our state legislatures have the backbone to make it happen through their own legislation? That remains to be seen.

For more information about the anti-commandeering principle, visit the Tenth Amendment Center. TAC has made great progress on a wide variety of projects all based on anti-commandeering and related legal concepts, such as the nullification of marijuana laws, the use of gold & silver as legal tender, putting an end to militarization of police forces, civil asset forfeiture reform, and many other issues where the federal government oversteps its legal authority.

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Michael Gibbs is the deputy director of the Arizona Tenth Amendment Center