A Column By John Sinclair
Hi everybody and welcome to post-Rump America. It’s just been a little less than a month since the presidential election, but it seems like 10 years already since we had to deal with that asshole as the leader of our battered nation, and I for one am vastly relieved and looking to the future with a whole different set of eyes.
This criminal bastard has tried every possible method of cancelling the will of the electorate and continuing his stay in office by any means necessary, but as of yesterday he seems to be giving up the ghost at last and letting the
people’s wishes take their appropriate course.
As a Detroit resident and a long-time registered Democrat, what galled me the most was his henchman Rudy Gugliani’s attempt to throw out the votes of those Wayne County citizens whose plurality was what turned the trick in Michigan and altered the outcome from -10,000 to +154,000 votes
against the despot.
To get rid of the Rump regime after four years of utter humiliation and chagrin is a beautiful thing, and I’m very happy to have been an integral part of the decisive vote in the state of Michigan, which helped elect this asshole four years ago when 60,000 voters refused to cast a vote for
president and the Rump won by 10,000 ballots.
This time more people voted than ever before in American history—the loser got more votes than any previous winner—and the only surprising thing is how many people stuck with Resident Rump after his disgraceful comportment as our president. This is doubtless the result of his 10 years
as the star of America’s favorite TV program and as the “boss” everyone loved to watch week after week in their living rooms.
This country started to go to shit when the CIA and the gangsters combined to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963. It got worse when his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, refused to run for reelection rather than give up on the War in Vietnam, turning things over to the scoundrel Richard M. Nixon for about six years before we could throw him out—but not before he was able to institute the War on Drugs in 1971, a stratagem that sent our country spinning down the toilet for the next 50 years.
Then, after the brief respite of four years of the great Jimmy Carter, America bought into the horseshit politics of the B movie actor Ronald Reagan and his successors in the Bush family, spelled only by the two terms of the phony Democrat, William Jefferson Clinton and his famous blow jobs alternating with his scrapping of the time-tested public welfare system and his embrace of the War on Drugs.
Throughout this entire period, and continuing into the otherwise exemplary eight years of the Obama-Biden administration, all government bodies clung to the War on Drugs as the powerful centerpiece of the police state society they were busy creating out of what used to be America, and
only the tireless efforts of the warriors of the marijuana legalization movement were able to make a change in the system big enough to benefit the rest of us.
Now a writer called Kyle Jaeger has filed a report titled WHAT JOE BIDEN’S PRESIDENTIAL VICTORY MEANS FOR MARIJUANA IN 2021 and leads with the conclusion that if Biden fulfills a key campaign promise once he gets to the White House, federal marijuana reform will be part of his administration’s legacy.
“Although the former vice president has embraced decriminalizing cannabis possession,” Jaeger writes, “he has faced criticism over pushing punitive anti-drug legislation during his time in the Senate. And reform advocates have similarly taken him to task over his refusal to join the majority of U.S. voters and a supermajority of those in his own party in embracing broad adult-use marijuana legalization.
“But the political dynamics that will define marijuana policy in 2021,” Jaeger adds, ”go beyond the presidency. The fate of reform still rests largely on Congress. But it’s unclear at this point which party will control the Senate next year. Democratic leaders have pledged an end to federal marijuana prohibition, and if the party wins the majority (following the two Georgia Senate elections in January), the stage will be set for far-reaching reform.
“Unlike President Trump,” Jaeger continues, “Biden has said that his administration will pursue marijuana decriminali-zation and expungements for people with prior cannabis convictions. He also favors medical cannabis legalization, modestly rescheduling marijuana under federal law and letting states set their own policies without federal intervention. ‘We should decriminalize marijuana,’ Biden said during a town hall event last month. ‘I don’t believe anybody should be going ot jail for drug use.’ But at that same event, he again offered his vision for an alternative to incarceration for drug crimes that many advocates oppose: forced drug treatment.”
Jaeger notes that Biden will be joined by Vice-President Kamala Harris when he enters the Oval Office. The senator, he points out, became the lead Senate sponsor of a comprehensive bill to end federal prohibition last year. Harris said last month, Jaeger reports, that she has a “deal” with Biden to candidly share her perspective on a range of progressive policies he currently opposes, including legalizing marijuana, but she hasn’t indicated that she would
proactively push him in that direction.
“The senator also said,” Jaeger continues, “that the administration would have a commitment to decriminalizing marijuana and expunging the records of people who have been convicted of marijuana offenses.” Biden, for his part, has conceded that his work on punitive anti-drug legislation was a ‘mistake.’
“That said,” Jaeger adds, “shortly after becoming the party’s 2020 nominee, the former vice president’s ongoing opposition to recreational legalization is suspected of being at least partly behind the Democratic National Committee platform committee’s vote against adding the reform as a 2020 party plank in July.
“With a Democratic-controlled Senate and the party still in control of the House,” Jaeger says, “it stands to reason that cannabis reform would move in the 117 th Congress, even if the pace of that reform and the administration’s role in promoting it remain uncertain.
“It is also not entirely out of the question that a scaled-down proposal to simply protect people complying with state marijuana laws from federal interference—likely without the social equity and restorative justice components of Schumer’s bill or the MORE Act—could see the light of day.
“That possibility is boosted by the fact that voters in several Republican and swing states approved cannabis ballot measures on Election Day. Sen. John Thune (R-SD), the party’s whip, for example, now represents constituents who voted to legalize both recreational and medical marijuana by solid margins.
In conclusion, Jaeger points out that “the president has the unilateral authority to grant acts of clemency, including pardons and commutations, to people who have been convicted of federal marijuana or other drug offenses. He also gets to appoint an attorney general, drug czar and other officials who will make decisions on how the federal government handles the issue -though many of those officials will be subject to Senate confirmation.
For his part, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) told Marijuana Moment in August that “the Biden administration and a Biden Department of Justice would be a constructive player in advancing legalization.”
“But in the end,” Jaeger sums up, “Biden remains out of step with the majority of his party and U.S. voters more broadly on the question of legalization. That said, his recent pivot in favor of decriminalization and medical cannabis legalization indicates that he recognizes that a tough-on-crime approach to drugs is no longer politically acceptable to voters and signals that further evolution in his position on cannabis is possible.”
FREE THE WEED, Mr. President! It’s your turn now.
