US drug control agency will move to reclassify marijuana

On one hand I'm very happy with all the recent policy changes coming down from different federal agencies, but on the other there's a very high likelihood that they will all be reversed a few months from now if/when a new administration takes over. That is always the downside of executive rule. With Congress unwilling/incapable of acting though I guess this is the best we'll get.

At least it'll be one fewer "both sides" argument to be made.

What bothers me is that all these things are only happening because it's an election year and the incumbent doesn't have great polling numbers.

Well, politicians doing what people want in order to get reelected is kinda the point of democracy.

This kind of rule should be made by an executive agency, empowered by a congressional delegation of that rule-making power to that agency.

This is just the same principle as private organization boards of directors delegating the minutia of running the organization to the executives and their teams. If you think it would be madness for hiring decisions on individual contributors to be made by board votes, then you should support the delegation of rule-making authority to executive agencies.

Yes, it means that changing the executive might change the rules. Congress remains free to overrule the agencies by passing further legislation, if they so desire. And voters remain free to replace the executive the next time around, if they want to see different rules. These are all features, not bugs.

There is certainly value in stability and predictability, but there is even more value in having an executive branch of government that is empowered to make decisions quickly and a short feedback loop between the public and the government.

Maybe, maybe not. Support for the legalization of marijuana has consistently only gone up for 50 years and even more than half of conservatives supported it in 2023: https://news.gallup.com/poll/514007/grassroots-support-legal...

You typically see flip flop rulings on issues that half the country actually does not support.

Abortion is probably the biggest issue and that's because a lot of the country does not support it and this has not substantially changed in over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

Another contentious issue has been gay marriage but support for that has only risen over the years (although much more slowly), so generally that is another issue that I don't expect much flip flopping on: https://news.gallup.com/poll/506636/sex-marriage-support-hol...

That only works if the rulemaking happens based on scientific reason rather than politics.

... no, it works in general, for the reasons I went into in my comment.

{{Citation needed}}

> voters remain free to replace the executive the next time around

Note that there are only either 538 or 100 voters, depending on which position in the executive branch.

There's no need to talk down to me.

My point was that they could be doing what people want for the entire duration of their term, rather than in the last few months. To use an analogy, it's like a student getting bad grades all year and then doing a bunch of extra credit assignments when they're worried about failing the class.

Your chief complaint is not new, it's nearly as old as democracy itself.

Different forms of democracy have various trade-offs, what your describing is the trade-off of representative democracy.

They only dangle the carrot when they need something, ie reelection.

> Abortion is probably the biggest issue and that's because a lot of the country does not support it and this has not substantially changed in over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx

I'm sorry, am I reading the data incorrectly, or your comment incorrectly?

> Do you think abortions should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal in all circumstances?

> 2023 | 34(any) 51(some) 13(illegal) 2(no opinion)

According these data, the vast, vast majority of Americans support the right to abortion, correct?

You obviously haven’t been paying attention as these rule making processes started literally years ago that’s how much red tape there is to get through.

And even if what you are saying was true (it isn’t) isn’t that the entire argument for democracy in the first place? “Politicians make good policy because they want to get re-elected” is how we should hope things work.

the wording of the questions aren't good, but the states that have recently banned it certainly seem to be catering to the 13% who say illegal under all circumstances, due to the extremeness of the actual laws passed

before Roe was overturned I would have considered myself pro life because I don't believe in late term abortions, but with the new legal landscape I've become effectively pro choice because the new laws are so extreme that they ban life saving health care that has little to do with the life of the unborn

I wonder how many are like me

> I wonder how many are like me

I believe there are many, on "both sides."

I deeply appreciate your reply. This is extremely important.

The wording is what it's all about. When we put it into terms like "pro-life"/"pro-choice" - it does nothing to address the hard realities which need to be addressed when writing law.

We all keep getting played by yes/no, right/left, binary word game slogans. The realities are so much more complex.

Or 9 voters

Or, if someone gets his way, just 1

Is also partly the fault of voters for being so darn susceptible to recency bias. Do a lot of good at the start and then reach a lull and everyone's gonna hate. Timing can and has cost elections.

Bunch of Holden Caulfields imo who just refuse to 'vote for phonies' and still haven't grown uo

> This is just the same principle as private organization boards of directors delegating the minutia of running the organization to the executives and their teams.

It isn't, because the board can replace the executive leadership at any time, whereas the President can only be replaced every four years and isn't elected by the legislature whatsoever, bypassing checks and balances.

The proper way to delegate minutia to an administrative agency is to have them propose rules that Congress then votes on. The rules might be a thousand pages long and 99.9% uncontroversial, so those rules get rubber stamped, but controversial changes have to go through the political process because it gives Congress the opportunity to refuse.

> Congress remains free to overrule the agencies by passing further legislation, if they so desire.

But that's not how it works, because now you've inverted the default. Before you needed a majority of the House and Senate and the President's signature in order to make a change. Now you need all that to undo the change a President makes unilaterally -- implying that the President would veto it and the legislature would need a veto-proof majority. It's not the same thing at all and is handing too much power to the executive branch.

> There is certainly value in stability and predictability, but there is even more value in having an executive branch of government that is empowered to make decisions quickly and a short feedback loop between the public and the government.

There is value in allowing the executive branch to remove bad rules unilaterally, in the same way as the President can veto a bill. Allowing new rules to be created without the appropriate process is tyrannical.

This is misinformation.

Biden directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to reexamine the scheduling of marijuana in October 2022.

Nearly a year later in August 2023, the HHS wrote to the DEA recommending that marijuana be reclassified from Schedule I to Schedule III.

A month ago, the DEA was still "writing [their] recommendation" on what they should reclassify marijuana to (if any change was to happen).

And just now, April 2024, the DEA agreed with HHS (as reported by AP, DEA hasn't confirmed this yet).

So no, this isn't "just happening" now, this has been going on for years.

[1]: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... [2]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-30/hhs-calls... [3]: https://twitter.com/DEAHQ/status/1772987478548287891

It started in October 2022 (a month before midterms), if anything a skeptic would say that's more confirmation timing is suspect.

> pro life because I don't believe in late term abortions

So something that you'd probably be interested in are the turn away studies.

https://www.ansirh.org/research/ongoing/turnaway-study

The studies ask questions of people seeking abortions who ultimately can't because the law prohibits their abortion (usually because they waited too long).

One interesting finding of this study is that a big reason people wait too long is because getting to an abortion clinic is just too hard. In the Roe world, in some very large states like Texas there were just 1 or 2 abortion clinics for the entire state.

Late term abortions have never really been very common. That's because as you get later in the process, just doing a c section and adoption would generally be the more preferred route. When they do happen, it's pretty much always due to non-viability of the fetus.

And, this isn't directed to you, but another fascinating part of the turn away studies is that it's fairly common for people seeking abortions to be in long term relationships with children. For those people, financially supporting another child isn't really an option and adoption is really socially taboo. (Imagine explaining why you aren't pregnant anymore and why you don't have an infant child).

Yeah, but based on the guiding principle of democracy (govt by the will of the people), you'd hope to see them do that immediately instead of waiting years and years to do it when it is most strategically advantageous. I know politics is gamey like that by nature, but it sucks to see. The lag time between a policy becoming overwhelmingly popular and it actually being implemented is often long enough to radically alter the course of millions of peoples' lives.

Yeah, if only every year were election year....

> One interesting finding of this study is that a big reason people wait too long is because getting to an abortion clinic is just too hard. In the Roe world, in some very large states like Texas there were just 1 or 2 abortion clinics for the entire state.

This is part of the strategy against abortion. Make unreasonably short abortion windows (six weeks is often before many women even determine that they are pregnant) coupled with restrictive regulations designed to make the process as difficult and long as possible including multiple visits and mandatory waiting times. Throw on top of that the attacks on the few places which provide these services and you've got a situation that makes it extremely difficult for anyone not wealthy to get a legal abortion.

They've been working on this for two years, it was announced they'd do it in 2022.

While this is true, I'm not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. At some point, we decided as a nation to only care about politics during election years. Participation rates for local elections is near an all time low. If people were more involved with the process, I would imagine that we would see more movement in Congress as a reaction to the will of the people.

If doing it at the end of his term gets him more votes than the beginning, that means the voters want to see it done towards the end.

No, the President exerts significant control over executive agency policy, and is elected by many more people than that.

The President is elected by the 538 electors of the electoral college.

The ballot is a lie. You're actually voting for an elector, not the President.

In practice, the general voters typically see the electors vote the way the populace in their area voted, but that's not always the case.

> but that's not always the case.

When is that not the case?

I believe it would be a violation of current electoral law for electors to fail to cast votes as apportioned by the results of their state's general election.

In my view, being detached from the outcome of the general election in a state isn't the problem with the electoral college currently (though maybe it was in the past).

Rather, the problem is that the all-or-nothing apportionment of electoral college votes within most states often creates outcomes that wildly diverge from the national popular vote. But I think the idea of splitting up the general election vote tallying by state is a good one, because I think running one giant national vote would be more of a contentious logistical nightmare than it already is.

But if it were up to me, all states would apportion their electoral votes proportionally, and each state would get a lot more votes. That is, say California is allotted 10,000 "electors" and 57.25% of their votes go to one candiate, 39.67% goes to another, and 3.08% to a third, then the electoral college votes would be 5,725, 3,967, and 308, respectively. This would reach outcomes extremely close to a national popular vote, while still using the electoral college in a way that is no less ceremonial than it is today.

See the 2016 election with a number of faithless electors for the most recent example. Some states require electors to vote how the people vote, but not all.

Also, Maine and Nebraska don't always give all the electoral votes to the same candidate. I'm not sure the process in those states, though.

I don't really have much of an opinion on how the election could be better, but there are some interesting ideas.

I wrote my comments specifically with Maine and Nebraska in mind. They don't do exactly what I suggested with a proportional apportionment, but it's closer to that, and better for it. If every state did what they do, the electoral college would be a non-issue.

  > I wonder how many are like me

The silent majority, given the numbers cited above and general consensus.

  >I deeply appreciate your reply. This is extremely important.

Ditto.

  >The wording is what it's all about. When we put it into terms like "pro-life"/"pro-choice" - it does nothing to address the hard realities which need to be addressed when writing law.

The "clump of cells" term is equally as provocative as "baby-killer"; remember to emphasize with both positions. Neither are wrong.

  >We all keep getting played by yes/no, right/left, binary word game slogans. The realities are so much more complex.

Correct. But to clarify - there isn't one "player" controlling the strings (if only we could be so lucky,) but warring ideological/political/corporate oligarchs that have consolidated power as an emergent phenomenon of self-interested parties.

This settles into a duopoly, with periodic swings depending on macro-level events, as naturally both sides align with a "good" and the other "bad" in an all-relative social moral grandstanding power contest.

90%+ of abortions are essentially birth control.

The moral, social, political, biological, religious, physiological, cultural, and constitutional subjectivity of the matter juxtaposed against the objective nature of (current) (nominal) child-birth is easily the most difficult topic to reach common ground between the most vocal extremes.

All the while, most people agree late-term, medically unnecessary abortions are abhorrent.