It's actually wild what the executive can get done in an election year... With the side effect of dangling bait for legislators to take a contrarian, nationally unpopular position.
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[0]https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/26/health/fda-menthol-cigarettes...
My actual issue with this is:
a) it should have been done sooner. Waiting until $election_year to do something popular has severely damaged the growth of cannabis industry
and b) it's another executive branch rule by decree that could be reversed as soon as 6 months from now after election day.
Eh, October 2022 to April 2024 is close enough to 2 years out.
Not everyone agrees though. I don't want it legalized or normalized more.
And no I doubt this will rouse the pot smokers to vote, perhaps mail in, as they don’t have to do actually anything.
While you can make some amount of case that the timing makes it a manipulation, is this really the manipulation that bothers you?
I would rather there be no manipulations. But in a country that divides itself on infantile identity politics, fight fire with fire.
It is not a fair game. You can’t demand perfect intentions around this issue when politics is full of much worse actors.
Also to answer your question about weed stocks: I used to own cannabis stocks but dumped them about a year ago. Big mistake! They've doubled in price over the last week presumably from this news.
In a presidents first term they are incentivized to do just enough to not piss of the other side enough to get some crazy numbers out but do enough to appease the current voters that they tried.
But then in the second term any worry about being re-elected goes out the window.
Like I am still convinced that Obama was in support of gay marriage before he publicly said it, and just waited until after he was re-elected. At that point what was he going to loose?
Putting it another way nearly 3 quarters of citizens want it legalized. That's massive. It's as close to unanimous consensus as you can get on a hot-button issue like drugs.
It’s obvious to everyone that the democrats are losing their bread a butter voters, young people and black folks. This gets waved around for the nth time and everyone gets excited.
- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
And you have no issue putting words in my mouth. I said it was close to three-quarters, is "massive" and that you can't get closer to unanimous than that.
> Call it whatever you want but don't dismiss it.
29% want to lock up the other 71% for consuming a plant. And we don't know for sure that all of that 29% are entirely clean themselves.
So why not dismiss it? Why does the 29%'s opinion matter here? If 29% of the population said you should jail people for premarital sex, or smoking, or wearing shorts, or whistling in elevators, would you take them seriously?
A simple majority or supermajority is more than enough to legalize or abolish anything. Pretty much no issue requires 100% of everyone to agree.
I feel it is misleading to call it an "effort", as if the President was struggling against the very agencies that he was elected to lead, decisively. Congress is supposed to be the slow-moving deliberative rule-making body.
If he really did struggle, it would say a lot about the growth of the administrative state and would highlight a constitutional health issue.