General Politics Discussion (VI) [ARCHIVED] • Page 2114

Tammy + Tammy powers activate! Short of Michelle running I'm not sure how else we'd be able to actually unite the party

 

This is my favorite conspiracy theory currently. Folks just ignoring that there’s more votes per capita for every urban county (where Sanders is likely to perform best), which would hypothetically make it harder to report in bottleneck situations. Even without this tech mess, urban areas are almost always last to finish counting due to population density.

 

The just pure dumbfuckery of viral tweets today ... from the left! ... should be a sign of immense worry.

 

Tuesdays nights are set aside for me to write, I gotta get the hell away from this thread and anything that links to the SOTU

 

Take this with a grain of salt as I am not an attorney, just second-year law student. I also have not yet taken an administrative law course, and this action would probably involve agencies like DEA, FDA, maybe HHS, etc.

So as for federal legalization, it seems clear that's possible. While I think technically the final power to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act would reside with the AG, I'm thinking President Sanders' newly minted AG would probably be someone who would be fine doing that.

As for attempting to override state statutes criminalizing cannabis, it gets trickier and there's really not a for-sure answer because a lot of the final decisions will be made by federal judges. The most-likely path is that a Sanders administration tries to pressure states into legalizing cannabis by making some sources of federal funding contingent upon them doing that, but it unfortunately seems like the current federal bench wouldn't go for that. Obama HHS ran into a similar anti-coercion problem with Medicaid expansion, and the S. Ct. case in 2012(ish) struck down that part of the law.

Another problem would be that even if states stopped prosecuting cannabis possession wholesale, there's no guarantee that states would set up legal markets for cannabis.

Part of this might depend exactly on how state statutes are written because some might incorporate the whole CSA list as state-level charges, which would be different than a state statute that made cannabis and cannabis alone illegal.

The cleanest way to do this wouldn't be via executive order, but by passing a law in Congress, and I think eventually that's probably what will happen. Even that wouldn't be immune though, because if some state wanted to sue to challenge it, I'm not sure the current federal bench at any level (2d/9th Cir excluded maybe) accepts the Commerce Power justification for that law.

There also are broader issues about what the scope of executive power "should" be but I don't really care about that haha and I think once the Rubicon has been crossed with Bush, Obama, Trump admins doing a lot by EO you're not going to un-cross it so to speak.

Hope some of that makes sense and that I'm kind-of right haha

 

Thanks. This was the only other thing I found in brief searching: Could Bernie Sanders Actually Legalize Marijuana Nationwide On Day One As President?

 

this is basically the Pete campaign

 

Yeah I think most of this is right, basically tailors what I said but in more detail, and it reads like it was written by an attorney or someone with legal-adjacent training at least.

The bottom line practically is "no he probably couldn't fully legalize it nationwide, at least not on Day 1"

 

That executive order would be a powerful signaling mechanism though, and I think a Bernie DoJ would get us almost all the way to remedying the ill of prosecuting cannabis/drug users

 

At least with a Sanders administration there won’t be the ever present danger of the AG sending in the feds to bust up all the legal dispensaries in states like CA and CO on a whim

 

I forgot how much I absolutely hate these. It’s as if you threw all the white racist dads from youth sports into an auditorium and said “have a pep rally.”

 

lol at the replies

 

Obama used to give killer SOTU addresses.

I will not be watching this one.

 

Me, a conspiracy theorist: "why did you wait until right before the SOTU to post this"

 

Why on Earth would she shake his hand?

 

Tried to watch the SOTU but my laptop’s WiFi is shitting out and tbh that’s probably the best thing to happen for my mental health tonight

 

Hopefully his last one ever.

 

Glad I’m not watching

 

Lol is that Sinema?

 

Is that Sinema standing and clapping?

 

Yup lol