Something unusual happened this month: Senate Leader Chuck Schumer took a stand against President Joe Biden.
The New York Democrat, usually a strong ally of Biden, has turned into one of the Senate’s biggest proponents of legalizing marijuana, which Biden still opposes. But Schumer said he would continue with his legislative bill anyway.
“I want to direct my arguments against him, as many other lawyers want,” Schumer said. “But at some point, we’re going to move forward, period.”
Schumer is likely to worry, at least in part, about a primary challenge from the left in the future – something that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has openly discussed.
But there’s a bigger problem here for Biden. The president is increasingly out of step with not only his party but also the country and perhaps even most Republicans over marijuana legalization.
Marijuana legalization is extremely popular. Gallup and the Pew Research Center, two of the country’s leading polling station organizations, consistently found that at least two-thirds of Americans are legal.
Support is so high that a majority of Republicans – who are generally more skeptical about drug policy reforms – can support it at this point. Pew found that 55 percent of Republicans reproduce legitimacy. Gallup found that a slim majority of Republicans supported it in 2017, 2018 and 2019. It reversed in 2020, but the difference between support and opposition among Republicans was still within the sampling margin. And anyway, there was a solid minority of 48 percent behind it.
Support among Democrats, meanwhile, is in the high 70s and 80s in all polls.
Maybe Biden does not trust the polls – many of us will not do so after 2016 and 2020. But there is also real evidence that legalization is very popular.
In the first place, 17 states have now legalized marijuana, most recently New Mexico. Among the 15 states where marijuana legalization has been placed before voters since 2012 (when Colorado and Washington state were first legalized), it has won in 13.
Even more impressive is marijuana’s recent record in Republican states. Since 2012, marijuana legalization has been established in four states that former President Donald Trump won in 2020 by double digits. It won in three of the states (Alaska, Montana and South Dakota) and lost in one (North Dakota). Weeds are 3-1 in deep red conditions.
What, then, can Biden’s opposition explain? Based on his public remarks, he seems really conservative on the issue – he only pleads for decriminalization (in which the threat of imprisonment or imprisonment is removed for possession, but sales remain illegal), and calls for “more scientific investigations” into the issue. , especially whether pot is a ‘gate agent’.
After all, Biden not only supports much of the current drug war policies in the country. During the 1980s and 1990s, he supported and helped write bill after bill that toughened federal criminal penalties against all kinds of drugs. Biden has since admitted that he has gone too far in at least some respects, but this is where he built his early political career.
Of course, the failure of this policy is to stop major drug problems – the country is currently caught in its deadliest drug overdose crisis ever in the opioid epidemic – and the nature of the punishment of these policies is why the public after the legalization of marijuana supported. And the real evidence of legalization suggests that it works well, and even leads to governors in regulatory states regularly supporting them.
But Biden is not convinced, even if his party moves forward without him. With a veto in hand, it could make the president the biggest obstacle to legalization.