Why California’s daylight saving time debate is far from over

“Didn’t we vote to get rid of this?”

That’s what a lot of Californians waking up this past Sunday morning likely thought as they crawled out of bed with one less hour of sleep due to daylight saving time. 

The answer is yes and no. In 2018, roughly 60% of Californians voted to approve Proposition 7, which granted the state legislature authority to set one standard time. However, Congress still needs to pass a law allowing this before California can “ditch the switch.” 

Leslie Gielow Jacobs, the Anthony Kennedy professor of law at McGeorge School of Law, spoke with Insight host Vicki Gonzalez earlier this week to figure out why it’s taking so long even though most people want to make changing their clocks a thing of the past. Here’s what she had to say: 

Can you explain how this all came to be? Who determines us setting our clocks back or not? 

By a margin of 60% to 40%, the California voters said they wanted to be done with the time switch. But the wording of the proposition acknowledged that Congress has to pass a law before California would be allowed to keep daylight saving time permanent. It hasn't done that and that's why California hasn't done it yet,  and the 18 other states that seem to want to do it as well.

Do you know how daylight saving time got its start? 

Well, my mother always told me that we went to daylight saving time because the farmers really wanted it and we went back to standard time because the little kids going to school needed daylight. So, the second part of that may well be somewhat correct, but the first part is absolutely not correct. Farmers have always been opposed to daylight saving time because it's not good for their animals and it's not good for their workers. I'll note that lots and lots of sleep organizations and health experts are against daylight saving time as well. So why did it happen? It happened because of energy crises in World War I, World War II and then in the 1970s. So there were brief stints of federal law making it mandatory, but those got repealed.

Why do you think there isn't movement either within the California legislature or Congress to change this?

Well, there actually has been movement in Congress to change it. There's a Sunshine Protection Act of 2023. Then Senator Marco Rubio sponsored it and it passed the Senate unanimously, but then it's stopped in the House. And here's the issue, which is people are behind stopping the change, but people are very split about whether to keep daylight saving time or whether to keep standard time. So, a different poll, a YouGov poll that I looked at, indeed found 62% of Americans wanted to stop the change, but they were equally split on which way to go. And I think that's the same thing that's going on when Congress is looking at figuring out what to do. They're getting lobbied by really a majority of the health experts who say it's much better for our bodies to be following the circadian rhythm of the sun, early sunlight on our skin, earlier darkness, so the melatonin kicks in. But then we've got the recreation and the business interests, and maybe people generally who think “I kind of like that light in the evening.” So that's where I think we got our stumbling block.

Would it be worth having another ballot initiative or proposition to get some movement if those 60% of voters who wanted Prop 7 in the first place six years ago are a little frustrated that things haven't changed?

Due to a quirk in the federal law, if California were to have a proposition that said, “Let's adopt uniform standard time,” they could because that's what Arizona and Hawaii are doing. So the federal law decrees a uniform daylight savings time. So you can't deviate from that, but it doesn't say that you can't choose all year long to be standard time. So it would be possible to choose that. 

Are other states in a similar situation like California?

I think it's about 18 states that similarly have various different laws saying, “Let's go ahead and change if Congress changes,” so they may well be having similar types of conversations. I'll note that the current president and our DOGE head have also tweeted that they'd be in favor of not having the change, although not completely clear which way to go.

It seems like what I'm learning from you, it really hinges on which way to go.

It hinges on which way to go and in Congress, it hinges on which way to go and it hinges on priorities too. Congress has to decide it's important enough to get a law like this passed. 

What do you find interesting about this? As a law professor, someone who has worked at the Supreme Court, you are really good with understanding policy and and language in a legislative fashion. What stands out to you about this daylight saving time debacle?

A debacle, or an example of how our constitutional structure is set up? We always talk about federalism, we talk about states' rights. We have states doing different sorts of things, although they must have a uniform daylight savings time if they choose that. But chaos is part of the law-making process and education would be part of it too. That is for the people who voted for Proposition 7, did they think about the difference between daylight saving time and standard time or were they just voting to stop the change? So there's room for that as well.