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Spending Bill Surprise: Congress Ends Federal Government’s Ban On Medical Marijuana

Spending Bill Surprise: Congress Ends Federal Government’s Ban On Medical Marijuana

By Evan Halper, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Tucked deep inside the 1,603-page federal spending measure is a provision that effectively ends the federal government’s prohibition on medical marijuana and signals a major shift in drug policy.

The bill’s passage over the weekend marks the first time Congress has approved nationally significant legislation backed by legalization advocates. It brings almost to a close two decades of tension between the states and Washington over medical use of marijuana.

Under the provision, states where medical pot is legal would no longer need to worry about federal drug agents raiding retail operations. Agents would be prohibited from doing so.

The Obama administration has largely followed that rule since last year as a matter of policy. But the measure approved as part of the spending bill, which President Obama plans to sign this week, will codify it as a matter of law.

Pot advocates had lobbied Congress to embrace the administration’s policy, which they warned was vulnerable to revision under a less tolerant future administration.

More important, from the standpoint of activists, Congress’ action marked the emergence of a new alliance in marijuana politics: Republicans are taking a prominent role in backing states’ right to allow use of a drug the federal government still officially classifies as more dangerous than cocaine.

“This is a victory for so many,” said the measure’s co-author, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). The measure’s approval, he said, represents “the first time in decades that the federal government has curtailed its oppressive prohibition of marijuana.”

By now, 32 states and the District of Colombia have legalized pot or its ingredients to treat ailments, a movement that began in the 1990s. Even back then, some states had been approving broader decriminalization measures for two decades.

The medical marijuana movement has picked up considerable momentum in recent years. The Drug Enforcement Administration, however, continues to place marijuana in the most dangerous category of narcotics, with no accepted medical use.

Congress for years had resisted calls to allow states to chart their own path on pot. The marijuana measure, which forbids the federal government from using any of its resources to impede state medical marijuana laws, was previously rejected half a dozen times. When Washington, D.C., voters approved medical marijuana in 1998, Congress used its authority over the city’s affairs to block the law from taking effect for 11 years.

Even as Congress has shifted ground on medical marijuana, lawmakers remain uneasy about full legalization. A separate amendment to the spending package, tacked on at the behest of anti-marijuana crusader Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD), will jeopardize the legalization of recreational pot in Washington, D.C., which voters approved last month.

Marijuana proponents nonetheless said they felt more confident than ever that Congress was drifting toward their point of view.

“The war on medical marijuana is over,” said Bill Piper, a lobbyist with the Drug Policy Alliance, who called the move historic.

“Now the fight moves on to legalization of all marijuana,” he said. “This is the strongest signal we have received from Congress (that) the politics have really shifted. … Congress has been slow to catch up with the states and American people, but it is catching up.”

The measure, which Rohrabacher championed with Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA), had the support of large numbers of Democrats for years. Enough Republicans joined them this year to put it over the top. When the House first passed the measure earlier this year, 49 Republicans voted aye.

Some Republicans are pivoting off their traditional anti-drug platform at a time when most voters live in states where medical marijuana is legal, in many cases as a result of ballot measures.

Polls show that while Republican voters are far less likely than the broader public to support outright legalization, they favor allowing marijuana for medical use by a commanding majority. Legalization also has great appeal to millennials, a demographic group with which Republicans are aggressively trying to make inroads.

Approval of the pot measure comes after the Obama administration directed federal prosecutors last year to stop enforcing drug laws that contradict state marijuana policies. Since then, federal raids of marijuana merchants and growers who are operating legally in their states have been limited to those accused of other violations, such as money laundering.

“The federal government should never get in between patients and their medicine,” said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA).

Photo: North Cascades National Park via Flickr

New Federal Budget Bill Lets Political Parties Cash In

New Federal Budget Bill Lets Political Parties Cash In

By Lindsay Wise, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — A provision in the $1.1 trillion omnibus budget bill that President Barack Obama is expected to sign into law this week will open up new sources of cash for the nation’s two political parties.

Eleven paragraphs added to the bill as a last-minute rider increase the amount individuals can donate to national parties by almost tenfold, to $1.5 million per two-year election cycle. The previous limit was $194,400.

The money can be deposited only in accounts designated for specific purposes, such to finance a presidential nominating convention, renovate a party’s headquarters or defray expenses related to election recounts and “other legal proceedings.”

Parties will have to disclose the names of anyone who contributes to the accounts.

Advocates of the rider say it will get taxpayers off the hook for paying for political conventions and increase accountability in political fundraising. But those who oppose the change complain that it will open the floodgates of big money in elections.

“Elections are supposed to be battles of ideas, not playgrounds for wealthy special interests to buy the loyalty of politicians,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who voted against the spending bill last week in protest.

“Since the Supreme Court gutted our campaign finance laws, we’re left with a situation where those special interests have a growing ability to try to buy a government to their liking,” McCaskill said in a statement. “That’s why now is not the time to be giving millionaires and billionaires even more influence over campaigns.”

The rider blows up one of the few remaining campaign contribution limits, said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen, a liberal advocacy group and research center in Washington.

“The sums of money involved have nothing to do with empowering regular Americans in any way,” Weissman said. “This is only about the parties’ ability to solicit donations from the super-rich.”

Public Citizen, League of Women Voters and several other advocacy groups sent a letter to the president, urging him to veto the spending bill to halt what they describe as “the most corrupting campaign finance provisions ever enacted.” But the White House has said he won’t.

Obama isn’t very happy about some aspects of the spending bill, but he thinks the overall legislation is a better deal than he could get in the next Congress, both houses of which will be controlled by Republicans, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday aboard Air Force One.

“So the president made a tactical decision to go ahead and support this piece of legislation,” Earnest said.

Obama campaigned for president on a platform that included tightening campaign finance laws, but he hasn’t followed through on that pledge, Weissman said.

“This administration really hasn’t done anything at all to improve the campaign spending corruption of our democracy. And they said they objected to this, but they permitted it to go through,” he said. “They even pushed for votes for the bill to go through.”

Both Democrats and Republicans stand to benefit from easing the limits on contributions to their national committees. The change will affect the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, as well as each party’s campaign committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

An infusion of cash might be especially handy for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which ended the November midterm elections $20 million in debt. Officials at the committee have denied that they were involved in inserting the campaign finance rider into the omnibus, as did the DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Politico and other news organizations have reported that the language was drafted by a Democratic attorney from Seattle, Marc Elias, at the behest of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who they said negotiated the addition of the rider with House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Elias’ firm has represented the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Although no one accepts public responsibility for the rider, its unlikely origins can be traced to the Gabriella Miller Kids First Research Act, named for a 10-year-old girl who died of cancer.

Obama signed that measure into law last year. It allots $12.6 million annually for pediatric cancer research at the National Institutes of Health. The cost was covered by ending public funding for political conventions.

Members of Congress complained at the time the research bill passed that it was “purely symbolic” and in reality did nothing to increase the amount of money available to support biomedical research.

Last week, however, Boehner pointed to the Gabriella Miller bill as the reason it was necessary to add the controversial campaign finance rider to the omnibus bill.

“This provision was worked out in a bipartisan way to allow those who are organizing political conventions to raise the money from private sources as opposed to using taxpayer funds,” Boehner said.

Democratic lawmakers such as McCaskill and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, who balked at the rider, found themselves in rare agreement with Tea Party activists, who usually support looser campaign finance restrictions. In this case, however, those activists are worried that easing just the contribution limits for national campaign committees will give an unfair advantage to the establishment wings of both parties.

The omnibus rider won’t “create a level playing field for candidates who are outside the Beltway,” David N. Bossie, the president of the political action committee Citizens United, said in a statement.

“What congressional leaders are doing is what they do best: protecting incumbents and the two-party system,” Bossie said.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus argues that the rider will have the opposite effect, increasing fairness in political fundraising.

“Lately, we’ve seen an influx of money into organizations that have no contribution limits; some don’t have to disclose their donors to the public,” Priebus wrote in a recent USA Today opinion piece. “Because of Congress’ vote, some of the money that might have gone to those organizations could instead go to the national parties, in a completely transparent process.”

Priebus apparently is referring to the so-called dark money that “super” PACs and other groups can accept from unnamed contributors, unlike the national parties, which must release donors’ names publicly.

More than 1,200 super PACs spent a total of $346 million on midterm elections in 2014.
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(Lesley Clark contributed to this report.)

Photo: Public Citizen via Flickr

Poll: Democratic, GOP Bases Disenchanted With Their Parties

Poll: Democratic, GOP Bases Disenchanted With Their Parties

By David Lightman, McClatchy Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — Congress heads home for the holidays with a hearty good riddance from voters.

Even partisans have soured on their own parties. Republicans are disenchanted with Republicans in Congress, according to a new McClatchy-Marist Poll. Democrats are unenthusiastic about Democrats.

The most negative: the two party bases, with conservatives negative on Republicans on Capitol Hill and liberals negative on Democrats.

Those negative reactions were aggravated in recent days as the parties fought internal battles over the $1.1 trillion spending plan that finances government operations. Liberals objected to provisions easing restrictions on financial institutions, while conservatives were angry the measure did little to block President Barack Obama from carrying out actions to ease deportation of undocumented immigrants.

Party leaders prevailed, but the parties’ bases were unhappy. The poll reflects the turmoil, and the public’s disgust with it.

Voters overall disapproved 66-28 percent of the job Republicans are doing, only slightly better than the 71-24 percent in October before the GOP swept midterm elections.

Democrats and independents led the disapproval of the congressional Republicans. But Republicans themselves only narrowly approved their own party’s performance, 51-45 percent. And conservatives disapproved, 53-41 percent.

Voters overall disapprove of the Democrats as well, 65-27 percent. That was the worst for the Democrats in the three-and-a-half years that Marist has posed the question.

Republicans and independents led the disapproval. But again it was internal dissent that hurt the party, with self-identified Democrats approving their party’s congressional performance just 55-33 percent, and liberals disapproving 48-45 percent.

There was a glimmer of hope for Republicans. Nearly half of the voters said they want Republicans to have more influence over the nation’s direction in the next year; 42 percent said they preferred Democrats.

Republicans next year will control of both houses of Congress for the first time in eight years. The party gained nine Senate seats and will start 2015 with its biggest House of Representatives majority since the late 1940s.

Most people expect few differences from the inertia that’s paralyzed Washington for years. Thirty-five percent said the Republican takeover would mean change for the better, while 40 percent saw no change and 20 percent said things will get worse.

“This looks like more of the same in Washington, other than a reshuffling of the characters,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in New York, which conducted the poll.

The top four congressional leaders will remain the same, though Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada will swap titles.

People remain unenthusiastic about the status quo. Obama’s approval rating in the latest survey was 43 percent, down from October’s 46 percent. The approval number has not topped 50 percent since October 2009.

Americans remain rattled by the aftershocks of the 2007-09 recession, when unemployment reached 10 percent. Though last month’s jobless rate was 5.8 percent and gasoline prices are at their lowest levels in five years, Americans aren’t convinced the good times will last.

“Improvement in unemployment makes a nice headline, but it doesn’t necessarily translate to making ends meet every day,” Miringoff said. “No one’s convinced things are going to improve over the long haul.”

About one-third said they expect their family’s finances to improve in the next year, while half said they would stay about the same. About one-third saw the country going in the right direction, while nearly two-thirds saw it going on the wrong path.

Obama came under fire on several fronts. Thirty-eight percent said they approved of his foreign policy, 8 percentage points lower than in October, while 52 percent disapproved. Obama expanded the campaign against Islamic State terrorists in September with military action in Iraq and Syria.

Forty-one percent approved of how the president is handling the economy, while 55 percent disapproved. Those numbers have barely moved for years. They topped 50 percent in Obama’s first year but have never reached that level since.

One key to change: compromise. Seven of 10 said lawmakers should find common ground. Obama has met with Republican leaders since the election, and Saturday, the Senate passed a bipartisan $1.1 trillion spending plan that funds most of the government through Sept. 30.
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METHODOLOGY

This survey of 1,140 adults was conducted Dec. 3-9 by the Marist Poll, sponsored in partnership with McClatchy. People 18 and older residing in the continental U.S. were interviewed by telephone using live interviewers.

Landline telephone numbers were randomly selected based on a list of exchanges from throughout the nation from ASDE Survey Sampler Inc. The exchanges were selected to ensure that each region was represented in proportion to its population. Respondents in the household were selected by asking for the youngest man.

To increase coverage, this landline sample was supplemented by respondents reached through random dialing of cellphone numbers from Survey Sampling International. The two samples were then combined and balanced to reflect the 2010 census results for age, gender, income, race and region. Results are statistically significant within 2.9 percentage points.

There are 923 registered voters. The results for this subset are statistically significant within 3.2 percentage points. The error margin increases for cross-tabulations.

Photo: President Barack Obama (2nd L) meets with Speaker of the House John Boehner (L), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (2nd R) and others during a bipartisan congressional leadership luncheon at the White House in Washington, DC, November 7, 2014/afp.com /Jim Watson

The ‘Hunger Games’ Economy

The ‘Hunger Games’ Economy

That our Congress is intent on taking from the many to enrich the few was on full display during passage of the new $1.1 trillion federal spending bill, as five provisions show.

In a Washington run by and for oligarchs, official theft happens suddenly and without warning. No public hearings. No public debate. Instead, as we saw in North Carolina and Wisconsin, it occurs with just abrupt moves to shift power and money from the many to the richest few.

And with little focus by our best news organizations on the consequences for people’s lives, especially if they are in the 90 percent, many people have no idea they just got officially mugged.

The continuing resolution to fund the government was combined with an omnibus spending bill to create a 1,603-page statutory monster called the “cromnibus.” Among the provisions that show how both political parties help corporations pick the pockets of the vast majority, while far too many mainstream journalists help obfuscate the awful truth:

• Already retired blue-collar workers who belonged to unions can now be cheated out of some of their pension money, with only those age 80 and older fully protected.

• Another $345.6 million will be cut from the budget of the Internal Revenue Service, in a favor to big corporations and the rich that will have little effect on workers, whose taxes are withheld before they are automatically processed via computer. The cuts mean fewer audits of corporations and rich individuals. Top corporate auditors earn at most about $150,000 a year, but find on average $19 million of taxes owed. To Congress, that $126 to $1 ratio is not worth the political cost, but shifting more of the burden of government to you is cheap and easy.

• Another $60 million was cut from the Environmental Protection Agency, in a boon to companies that pollute the air and water, and instead of cleaning up after themselves, shove the expense onto all Americans.

• Despite a 2-1 vote to legalize marijuana in the District of Columbia, Congress said no, revealing again how Washington does not trust the states or local governments.

Cromnibus – Just Another Word for Theft

And then there is the biggest and baddest provision, the one that could sink the economy again the way reckless behavior on Wall Street cost trillions of dollars in 2008.

The big banks are now free to enjoy their winning bets in the derivatives casino, while forcing taxpayers to pick up the losses if they grow so large that they threaten to bankrupt any bank. Majorities in the House and Senate evidently forgot that such gambling sank the economy six years ago.

The Wall Street bailouts infuriated voters, surveys show, but when it came time to vote, the citizenry seemed not to be able to connect the dots between senators and congressmen who collect their pay from taxpayers but regard Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase, Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, and other big bankers as their real bosses.

The cromnibus repealed a portion of the Dodd-Frank bill, which prohibited buying derivatives with regular bank deposits, like your paycheck money, which the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation insures up to $250,000. If banks place a lot of bad bets, the FDIC will now have to step in to cover them.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, tried to stop this massive giveaway to the five biggest banks in America, which do 95 percent of the derivatives business. But even Warren’s moral authority and deep expertise in how banks operate with disregard for the general welfare were not enough to overcome the power of their campaign contributions and connections.

Dimon, the boss at JPMorgan Chase, was whipping votes for the provision. Backing him up was President Obama, whose administration has refused to prosecute the “Too Big to Fail” banks and whose attorney general, Eric Holder, repeatedly lied when he claimed to be pursuing the bankers.

So powerful is the influence of Wall Street money that the provisions Warren railed against were literally written by Citigroup, as Mother Jones revealed. The Senate voted 56-40 for the cromnibus, including the Citigroup language.

In what could have been a scene in the Hunger Games movies, the big banks and our elected leaders joined together to steal from blue-collar workers.

For the first time in 40 years, since the Employee Retirement Income Security Act was adopted in 1974 to ensure workers would collect pay they deferred into pension plans for their old age, Congress decided that benefits already earned can be taken away.

This historic shift got one sentence in The New York Times: “It allows certain multi-employer pension plans to shore up their finances by cutting retirees’ benefits.”

Notice the focus on the money and the pension plan without mentioning that up to 1.5 million workers and retirees will be affected, or that the first big plan failures are not expected for more than a decade.

Elitist Journalism

That this provision got almost no news coverage shows just how much our leading news organizations cater to economic elites favored by advertisers, and how the current generation of reporters at the best news organizations comes heavily from the upper economic tiers of American society.

Reporters and editors whose parents were coal miners, truck drivers and clerks have given way to those with degrees from elite schools, some with trust funds that insulate them from the realities of American life for the vast majority. With that shift comes a predicable change in perspective, from “there is plenty that needs fixing” to “the world generally seems quite just.”

In the late 1990s I suggested a story about how a family gets by on two grand a month. A prosperous colleague at The Times said, “No one in New York City lives on $25,000.” When I offered to take my colleague to the subway stop at 74th St. and Roosevelt Ave. in Queens, saying we could easily find such people on the streets, the reply shifted to this: “Oh, those people. Nobody cares about those people.”

The Times has, of course, written a great deal about the poor, but in the daily report about the cromnibus and other legislation, the tone and the specific details often focus on the institutional — as with the single line above about strengthening balance sheets — rather than the unbalancing of retirees’ meager finances.

Next month a new Congress will begin. Expect more of the same – rapid and major changes, and cuts and repeal of longstanding laws that have in common one element found in the preamble to our Constitution: promoting the general welfare.

AFP Photo/Saul Loeb