On Marijuana Policy Reform, Senate to Do What it Does Best: Nothing
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Proponents of the strongest version of the War (On Classes Some People Who Use Some) Drugs ain’t going down without a fight:
But the Senate Judiciary Committee is emerging as a serious buzz kill for the pro-reform set.
The powerful panel is stacked with some of the most senior lawmakers in Congress, many of whom came to power during a tough-on-crime era of the drug wars that saw stiffer penalties for drug possession. Several of them openly gripe about what they call the Obama administration’s lack of enforcement of existing federal drug laws — and they certainly aren’t willing to send a signal that Congress is OK with the movement to liberalize pot.
“I’m probably against it,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the most senior Senate Republican and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said of the cannabis bill
“I don’t think we need to go there,” added Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican and former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice. “This is a more dangerous topic than what a lot of the advocates acknowledge.”
Republicans most recently made news on the marijuana front in December, adding language to a spending bill that effectively blocked sales of pot in the District of Columbia — where, a month earlier, voters overwhelmingly approved a legalization measure.