Today President Trump May Have Put the Libertarian Party Out of Business AND Locked Up the Millennial Vote For 2020

Today, President Trump weighed, unscripted, into another hot-button issue. Legal pot, licit ganja.

Even though marijuana remains a Schedule 1 narcotic, it is legal in some form in most states. In nine states, it is permitted for recreational use. States were permitted to do this under the authority of what was known as the Cole Memorandum, a DOJ memo, which did for weed what the Napolitano Memo did for illegal aliens. Based on the fiction of “prosecutorial discretion” the Obama administration did an end run around Congress. While marijuana laws were on the books, DOJ was told not to enforce them. Like any other policy pulled out of one’s butt, it was subject to the vagaries of political fortune. One of the first things Jeff Sessions did upon becoming Attorney General and discovering real crime had vanished and law enforcement and prosecutors were literally dying of boredom was to rescind that memo.

In a press encounter today, President Trump said that he would sign a bill changing the status of marijuana should it reach his desk.

“I support Sen. Gardner. I know exactly what he’s doing,” Trump told reporters. “We’re looking at it. But I probably will end up supporting that, yes.”

A day earlier, Garner and Warren, who both represent states with legal recreational marijuana, introduced the Strengthening the Tenth Amendment Through Entrusting States Act, in response to increasing opposition toward the substance from Trump’s Department of Justice.

The bipartisan bill would amend the Controlled Substances Act to include a framework that says it no longer applies to those following state, territory or tribal laws “relating to the manufacture, production, possession, distribution, dispensation, administration, or delivery of [marijuana].”

The two senators announced a partnership on the legislation in April in an effort to hold Trump to his word about favoring a states-rights approach to recreational pot, a position he voiced during the 2016 presidential race.

I’m sort of agnostic on the subject of weed. But I do think we spend a helluva lot of time an energy trying to eradicate domestic marijuana and if states want to legalize or decriminalize it, I don’t have a problem letting them go that way. Unlike alcohol or meth or PCP, you never hear of a weed-crazed gunman committing mayhem though I would consider putting an extra lock on my fridge.

Trump is doing this as a favor to Cory Gardner and because Jeff Sessions, who apparently has seizures at the thought, no longer has any juice at the White House.

My headline is only half joking. Once weed is legalized, the libertarian party goes away. Not because a libertarian Eden has been achieved but because most of them will be too smoked to bother to get out of bed on Election Day. And taking the risk to legalize marijuana will make inroads for the GOP with some voting demographics.

President @realDonaldTrump says he will support ending federal ban on Marijuana. If this gets done he’s looking at an absolute landslide re-election in 2020. The President is making huge unifying moves today. https://t.co/i2u1xW39mQ

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) June 8, 2018

Trump says he supports a bill from Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) to protect states which legalize marijuana, as well as banks that work with legal cannabis businesses https://t.co/keYXBklxxL

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 8, 2018