My comment is that making the 2024 election a referendum on legalization (and a few other big issues like abortion) will likely be the good strategic play. You could imagine a future, though, where they go ignore legalization and focus entirely on abortion and other issues.
But they would risk getting outflanked on legalization by a more libertarian-minded Republican, which could cost the election due to reducing turnout of young and disillusioned voters who would otherwise go Dem.
My take is that most people don't see cannabis legalization as an important-enough issue. It's kind of "would be nice" issue that's overweighted by issues like economy, democracy, and immigration.
I'm not in the US, but that's my only explanation for why hasn't cannabis been legalized on the federal level yet, i.e. that people simply don't care enough about it to even be a part of the discussion.
The big divide is really by age. Older voters (in both parties) tend to oppose it. 72% of people under 30 are pro-legalization, but only 30% of people older than 75 are. The average for all US adults is 60%.
Younger voters' low turnout messes up the calculus here. But as soon as the number of young voters you'd gain exceeds the number of old voters a candidate would lose, you'll start to see this play out, and I think we're really close to that tipping point.
It wasn't included thanks to Republicans.
So whenever good people try and come up with ideas about literally any subject. the republicans ie McConnell are ready to strike it down 100% of the time.
It doesn't matter that it has majority support. It doesn't matter if it helps save American lives. It does not matter what the logistics are or how much money is involved. It does not matter if it helps military veterans and minorities.
Every plan. Every thought. Every move. will be without fail. Denied. Denied. Denied.
That is their only play. and it will also be their downfall. much like a DDOS attack on a network. All we have to do is create a network stronger then the ones they have in play and they will cease to exist entirely. aka - voting. and with republicans saying don't vote - don't vote with mail in ballots - don't vote early.
They got absolutely destroyed pushing their own agenda. Its honestly amazing.
>It passed the House seven times — receiving a whopping 321 votes last year — and had enough GOP support to reach 60 votes in the Senate.
>But it did not have the support of McConnell, whose opposition kept it out of the spending bill.
>McConnell first blocked the SAFE Banking Act’s inclusion in the defense bill earlier this month, arguing that it would make the U.S. financial system “more sympathetic to illegal drugs.”
The only true policy is a coherent policy- anything else is just the whims of whoever holds executive fiat.
It should just be fully legalized.
- Should be denied because its currently not passed yet
- https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1996
- Passed House (04/19/2021)
- " It should just be fully legalized " - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrHecD8JhfY
- Then why does the government lie to its own people to push agendas ? Why is that allowed ?
- Oh right its because nobody knows how to read anymore. or educate themselves.
- Banks violate federal law on purpose pay a slap on the wrist fine and keep engaging in behavior that ruins the lives of millions around the world yet here you are FUCKING ACTING LIKE YOUR ABOVE ALL THIS BULLSHIT.
- Naw fam. Read.
- EDIT: fentanyl is a bigger priority. Yet you would probably convince yourself that somehow overdosing millions of Americans is completely fine unchecked - https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/12/22/us-life-exp...
- " The fentanyl category of opioids accounted for 53,480 preventable deaths in 2020, representing a 59% increase over the 33,725 total in 2019. "
- " Preventable drug overdose deaths increased 34.4% in 2020, from 62,172 in 2019. In 2020, 83,558 people died from preventable drug overdoses – an increase of 649% since 1999. These deaths represent 91% of the total 91,799 drug overdose deaths in the United States, which also include suicide, homicide, and undetermined intents. "
- AND BANKS CANT TAKE CASH FROM ALREADY LEGAL BUSINESSES OK DUDE. WHATEVER YOU SAY
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/books/article/3...
https://www.icij.org/investigations/fincen-files/global-bank...
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-fines-16-major-w...
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/industry/financia...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/20/investing/wells-fargo-cfpb-fo...
> Primarily, these involved deposits of traveller's cheques in euros. They had sequential numbers and deposited larger amounts of money than any innocent travelling person would need, with inadequate or no KYC [know your client] information on them and what seemed to a trained eye to be dubious signatures. "It was basic work," he says. "They didn't answer the obvious questions: 'Is the transaction real, or does it look synthetic? Does the traveller's cheque meet the protocols? Is it all there, and if not, why not?'"
The Affordable Care Act is probably the most impactful law passed by Democrats in the recent past. In a survey of 2000 voters, a staggering thirty-five percent did not know [1] that the ACA and the colloquial "Obamacare" were the same thing. Bizarrely, an additional number didn't know that 'Obamacare repealed = ACA repealed'.
I cannot blame either party for playing political football when dealing with this sort of electorate.
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[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/02/11/514732211/obamacare-and-affor...
I DO support a basic civics and mathematics test, on a recurring basis, for voters. HOWEVER, that's only with the catch that failing or opting out of the test creates benefits designed to encourage the citizen to pass the test in the future. A benefit like, access to public education to work on that math skills and civics awareness. Or possibly someone is disabled (often silently, dementia is a real issue!) and the voter tests might be one of the places it's discovered.
Also, literacy tests were ruled unconstitutional in Oregon v. Mitchell.
That's what is so mind-boggling to me.
The US as a whole spends more on healthcare than any other OECD country, and the fact that most people in the electorate don't care about this is kind of depressing.
Even Massachusetts elected a Republican Senator!
Even now I don’t think the Democrats gain much from bringing it up,
That's not how the Senate works. A 50-50 "majority" is not full control.
In any case, it's pretty silly to blame the party that's on your side for not being able to overcome the bad-faith obstructionism of the opposing party. It's not about political "footballs", it's about having finite time and public attention to be able to get things done. If every single fight has to be dragged into the public to shame the other side into taking a few minutes off from looting and pillaging, then you have to prioritize and pick the optimal time for each battle.
Is that really the case? It is a bias towards the status quo.
Regardless, IMO the constituents represented by those parties don't benefit from it.
Not a fan of the status quo, but with two largely insane parties fighting for power, I'm thankful for moderating forces.
Given that these kingmakers are what causes things to go over 50-50 they want to preserve their power.
> It is a bias towards the status quo.
These are the same thing.
Blaming the party rather than individual Senators is not a helpful way of looking at the problem.
The filibuster continues to exist because it gives people like manchin compete power, so the most moderate of each party will always try to keep it alive.
Not to be a complete downer, but there is so much special interest money involved in our political system, neither the Democrats or the Republicans are on your side. They are both on the moneyed interest side. These political footballs are, for the most part, to string along voters on "hot button" issues to keep the public disinterested on the numerous things that these parties actually agree on, like expanded military spending, global expansionism, corporate tax reduction, lessening monopoly laws, reducing banking restrictions, reducing spending on interstate infrastructure, cutting education spending and restricting the ability for fair and equal elections through redistricting. All of these (and more I can't think of) are bipartisan efforts.
Sorry... I shouldn't watch the news. It's a bummer =)
> expanded military spending
Democrats don't really vote for this, certainly not to the same degree, but sure, I wish there were more difference.
> global expansionism
Vague to the point of meaninglessness.
> corporate tax reduction
Definitely not the same. Democrats recently pushed for a minimum corporate tax (https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-corporate-tax-plan-th...).
> lessening monopoly laws
Also vague, but not generally true. Democrats will vote for actual antitrust legislation; they won't vote for the Republicans using "anti-trust" as a meaningless scare-word to bash businesses they don't like for unrelated reasons.
> reducing banking restrictions
Maybe in the 90s, but not recently. Who wrote the Dodd-Frank Act, and who repealed it?
> reducing spending on interstate infrastructure
Vague, but not generally true. There are a bunch of major transportation projects (e.g. California HSR, DC's Purple Line) that have been held up for ages because Democrats will vote to fund them and then Republicans will take it away, or because it's impossible to get Republican states/counties to pay their fair share. For telecomms, Democrats will tend to push more for equitable-access programs, whereas Republicans will frame corporate tax cuts as "infrastructure spending" as long as some infrastructure-related companies benefit. Go look at the numbers and priorities in the 2021 infrastructure bill (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_Investment_and_...), which passed on mostly party lines, and tell me the parties agree on cutting infrastructure spending.
> cutting education spending
Laughably false. Go look at the per-student education budget per state. (Federal DoE spending YoY is kind of weird because it's washed out by college loan financing; most direct spending on education is at the state level.)
> restricting the ability for fair and equal elections through redistricting
Seriously, you're going to sit there and argue, in the year 2022, that the parties are the same on election fairness? The fact that the Democrats don't aggressively gerrymander is why they don't currently hold the House - the New York legislature could have chopped up Long Island differently to stem the losses. More generally, Democrats consistently vote for protecting ballot access, against Republicans who nakedly want to make it more difficult to vote - and that's setting aside the whole armed-insurrection-to-overthrow-an-election thing, which, last I checked, 90% of the Republican party will still fall in line for.
I've kind of become a bit of a voting reform absolutist for this reason. Publicly funded elections, get rid of first-past-the-post plurality voting (and replace with approval, ranked choice, anything really), electoral college reform, Wyoming rule, etc.
If these problems were fixed, the incentives to solve the other problems are much more aligned.
The only current method would be to somehow convince the people in power that they will need to overhaul the system to stay in power in the future. But that’s not gonna happen because the existing loopholes are so massive (e.g. gerrymandering), that they can basically guarantee that anyway.
It’s also not a policy issue, and it feels weird to vote for it (or vote for people who promise it), because it’s not a direct thing that will affect your daily life and is more second order than that.
Act how?
Unlike marriage (where the FFC clause gives Congress an explicit power), the “codify Roe” refrain was always hollow since without Roe being a 14th Amendment right there is no real Constitutional argument for authority for federal codification.
This was simply yet another issue that was intentionally managed to benefit The Politics Industrial Complex.
Note: I don't consider HuffPost to be a beacon of journalism. It's simply the top of the SERP. I'm confident better have reported the same.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/biden-codify-roe-v-wade-congr...
Them having full control wasn't enough.
Democrats passed it in the House and all Democratic Senators supported it in the Senate. However, Republicans killed it because Democrats wanted the Omnibus bill to pass for which support from Mitch McConnell was necessary. Mitch McConnell was opposed to this Cannabis bill.
Link: https://thehill.com/policy/finance/3782514-marijuana-advocat...
The War on Drugs has effectively brainwashed most people to think that the best way to control "dangerous" drugs is to make them illegal.
And the politics of this is that were the Dems to try to do this then the GOP would campaign on the Dems trying to give drugs to kids like candy.
The DEA regularly describes it as dangerousness: “Schedule I is the most dangerous!”
But it’s not dangerousness, it’s whether there is a medical use.
Marijuana didn’t have a medical use, because it’s not very powerful. It makes you feel dizzy and hungry. If it was a drug, spinning around in circles would he schedule I.
Heroin is powerful enough to be a legit pain killer, so it’s Schedule II.
This really is a case of reporters not doing their job.
That’s what a democracy is. Democracies aren’t nicer places to live because our politicians are nice people. It’s because our interests happen to align with those of politicians. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
CGP Grey had a nice video on this, which I plagiarized for the comment above:
Every decision will result in some people supporting you and others working to kick you out of office.
If you don’t tread carefully you won’t be in power long.
It has nothing to do with the American system and everything to do with democratic representation in government.
Actually, they made this move just recently, not tied to an election. But Republicans blocked it in Senate.
Obama was elected on his promise of "hope" and "change" and he asked his voter base what to spend his time on. The top two issues were health care and cannabis. He noped cannabis.
Perhaps making this an election issue is actually the necessary ingredient to bring republicans on board.
If the polls are to be believed, this seems an unlikely outcome. I don't see a Republican candidate doing this, but stranger things have happened, I guess.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/11/22/americans-o...
A lot of right wing / libertarian adjacent people were hoping Trump would come out in favor of it as a 2020 election issue, to outflank Biden on at least one issue. It didn't happen, but I bet it would have made the election a bit closer -- it would have cooled support for Biden by a lot of younger and disillusioned voters.
I predict they'll make it a campaign issue and force the Republican candidate to come out strongly against it, to try to cool support from a lot of younger and pro-legalization Republicans.