Sen. Cory Gardner rips Jeff Sessions on Cole Memorandum Pull

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run time - 4:50.

I think he said it perfectly here and I really hope it gets immense traction with the rest of senate. Simply put - you don't play these kinds of games with states laws and massive amounts of infrastructure that's been put in place. It creates economic chaos, legal chaos, and it creates the danger of judges and law enforcement acting on whims.

Styx adding his input:

Jeff Sessions looks like one of those gnome-like trolls.

He seeks to take away rights for which we have fought for at least three centuries.

I just wish the Trump administration would just go away, frankly.

There's the stench of Machiavelli all round those people.

Well, the man knows that only bad people smoke marijuana...

I'm not a pot smoker. I hate the stench of it.

But I believe in the right for people to employ it to alleviate suffering which is derived from a medical condition---at the very least.

It's also a very dangerous game he's playing politically. MJ support is up to ~60% in national polls, it's been slowly creeping to that point from a low of ~16% in 1990. Public attitude has changed dramatically from when Sessions was a prosecutor of such offenses in the 1980's, and the trend is obviously towards legalization, especially since the sky hasn't fallen in states where it has some form of decriminalization. His viewpoint if that of dinosaur on this issue.Pew poll chart from 1969-2017.

Make no mistake this will boil down to federal vs state, and the federal government will win if it goes to court, as per the Constitution. That said, I would also point out: of the 29 states and D.C. that have medical or recreational marijuana, 2/3rds of those laws were passed by voters through direct democracy at the state level, not state representatives, governors, or courts-- it is the will of the people in those states. I'm from Colorado, one of said states, and I can tell you that a good portion of the anti-Marijuana campaigners in 2012 have changed their tune on the issue, Cory Gardner being the prime example. The state level politicians will fight with everything they have (at least here in CO), their re-election depends on it at this point. Sessions is stepping into a s**t show and he doesn't even realize it. As I said when push comes to shove the Feds will win, but they're going to get absolutely pummeled in court of public opinion.

Edit: I'd also point out that in Styx's video, he's vastly underestimating the power of the Interstate Commerce Clause, and it's historical application. It's not just that a product/service/what-have-you must cross state lines, for the clause to kick in, merely a sub product of said product must cross state lines for that clause to get in. Is it an abuse of the ICC? Yes, but it's also a 200 year precedent that it's a wide scoping law, and courts are very reticent to turn over their own precedents.

Last edited by Aristophanes on 05 Jan 2018, 1:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yep....alas, "States Rights" will be put to the fore again over this issue. As a result, the Alt-Righters will start harping about "States Rights" again.

That's a really poisonous and unfortunate association with what's really a very important idea. If Sessions's appointment as Attorney General made him emperor and there's nothing that over half of the states in the union can do about it we've clearly got severe strategic weak points in our system that need to be shored up.

My guess as to how this will turn out, within the next week most of the Republicans and nearly all of the Democrats will scream bloody murder in his direction until he fixes this. If he plays Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove at that point and starts talking to Mandrake about purity of bodily fluids he'll likely have a whole branch of the US government trying to figure out what needs to be done in order to veto his decision.

Andrew Napolitano chiming in on Fox:



They were digging at him even harder the day before with Dana Rohrabacher. Republicans from these districts clearly aren't interested in supporting him on this.

Statement yesterday from Earl Blumenauer:

Smack!

The really fascinating thing here, on a side note, is that Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows have been calling for Sessions to retire already based on their failure to follow up on the Hillary Clinton server and uranium probes as well as other issues. In a bizarre way he's given all the Republicans who've wanted him gone the rope to hang him with. It's really a bizarre turn of events when you think about it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-mea ... ler-2018-1

That's because it's a non-partisan issue in a highly partisan era. It polls above 40% in almost all demographics and hits a high over 70% in some. Since neither party claimed the issue 20 years ago when medical marijuana started hitting the states it didn't get ramrodded into the D v R clusterfuck, and one could claim it's also about the only political issue that's made real progress in that time frame. The most important presidential speech in American history wasn't Lincoln's Gettysburg address, it was George Washington's farewell speech.

Everybody is missing the whole reason this happened. All Sessions had to do was tell Trump that it was an Obama policy he was reversing because in Trump’s mind everything Obama ever did was bad because it was not associated with Trump. Merit had nothing to do with it. States Rights come on did Trump ever mention state involvement with the wall? Constitutionality as if that thought would ever enter Trump’s mind.

^^Or tell Trump marijuana has more popularity than him. But in all honesty I don't think Trump cares about this issue one way or another, so he'll let Sessions take care of it how Sessions sees fit and if it's popular it was his idea and if it isn't he never knew Sessions, he was just some low level aid he met once.