“It is another very vivid example of the clash between old-fashioned policies and where America is and where America is going,” said Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore), unofficial Capitol czar in an interview. “It is probably not surprising.”
Blumenauer is already putting together a letter with other parliamentarians “seeking clarification” from the Biden government about the layoffs.
Many Republican and Democratic lawmakers, including Vice President Kamala Harris, have changed their positions on legalizing cannabis in recent years. But Biden – who, as a senator, followed the 1994 crime bill that disproportionately hit communities of color and established mandatory minimum sentences for marijuana possession – never really liked the idea. Just last year, Biden’s team rejected the legalization of marijuana as part of the Democratic Party’s policy platform. It was a setback compared to 2016, when the party made history by endorsing a “path” towards legalization.
“They did not support deregulation and legalization,” said Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), Congressional Cannabis Caucus co-chairman who worked with Biden’s campaign on the Democratic Party’s platform last summer. She is requesting a meeting with the government to discuss cannabis policy, including the latest uproar over staff. In an interview, she added that the recent actions of the White House do not surprise her. “What this shows is the impact of these laws.”
Instead of endorsing full legalization, the Biden campaign proposed a patchwork of changes to federal drug law that would legalize, decriminalize and continue to ban cannabis in a variety of ways that experts say will be difficult to implement.
“His approach is very fragmented,” said John Hudak, an expert on cannabis policy and executive powers at the Brookings Institution. “It is difficult to see how it plays out.”
The White House decision to fire or penalize employees for marijuana demonstrates the gap between the Biden government and the majority of its party, which increasingly sees decriminalization or full legalization as an important issue in criminal justice reform.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki downplayed the Daily Beast report in a couple of tweets on Friday, while saying the security displays it wouldn’t be “automatically” disqualify a job seeker who has used marijuana.
“The end result is as follows: of the hundreds of people hired, only five people who started working at the White House are no longer employed as a result of this policy.” she added.
Almost all of Biden’s contenders in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries have issued a full endorsement of federal marijuana legalization. And two years ago, herself running for the White House, Harris, then a California senator, joked about smoking marijuana.
“I have … and I inhaled,” she said to the hosts of The Breakfast Club about smoking in college. “It was a long time ago … I think it gives joy to a lot of people and we need more joy”.
On the stage of the debate, Biden’s main opponents censored him for his reluctance to embrace the legalization of marijuana. Proponents of criminal justice reform blame the tough drug laws advocated by Biden and other lawmakers in the 1990s for arresting people for excessively punitive marijuana crimes. But Biden planted himself, suggested that marijuana was a gateway to the drug, sparking criticism that led him to go back on that statement.
He also said later that he did not think people should be arrested for marijuana and wanted to see marijuana records eliminated – a departure from the senator who criticized Republican President George HW Bush’s anti-drug plan for not going far enough.
“We have to come together to ensure that traffickers are punished quickly, safely and severely … we have to hold all drug users accountable,” Biden said at the time.
Now, a third of Americans live in a state where marijuana is legal and most support full legalization, including 83 percent of Democrats. Congress is trending like that too: the House passed a bill to legalize marijuana in December, and the Senate plans to follow suit soon. The Senate majority leader himself, Chuck Schumer, is drafting a new legalization bill and has already promised that if Democrats lead the chamber, legalization would be a priority.
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) And Schumer have comprehensive approaches to cannabis reform, while Biden’s strategy, says Hudak, is “public policy with a scalpel instead of an ax”.
In the election campaign, Biden praised his support for the decriminalization of cannabis and the transfer of marijuana from Table I to Table II. Marijuana is classified as a Class I substance, the most restrictive category alongside heroin and LSD.
But his proposal suggested a lack of familiarity with federal drug laws. Lawyers, state marijuana regulators and marijuana advocates have expressed confusion about their support for marijuana decriminalization and rescheduling. Cocaine and methamphetamine are substances in Table II and are still highly criminalized. It would be difficult, though not impossible, to achieve.
As a party candidate, Biden had new opportunities to take a more progressive stance on legalization, but instead insisted. His attempt to bring the progressive wing of the party through the “unity” task force with Bernie Sanders has resulted in commitments in policy areas such as climate change, immigration and economic policy – but not in marijuana. The only concession that Sanders’s nominees obtained in marijuana policy was to remove an element of the budget that prevented Washington DC from regulating marijuana sales. Even some of Biden’s nominees have failed to move him on the subject.
As head of the Democratic Party, Biden’s position had a ripple effect. The party rejected an amendment to support legalization as an official political platform, rather than adopting a decriminalization and purging platform that mirrored Biden’s position on the issue.
Harris also changed his rhetoric by accepting the Democratic nomination as Biden’s No. 2. The legislator who in 2019 sponsored comprehensive legalization in the Senate suddenly went on to publicize cannabis decriminalization instead of legalization.
But Biden can join his fellow Democrats over time, said Hudak of Brookings.
“We should not confuse a president who … is not a major marijuana reformer with a president who has not changed his views over time,” he said. “Biden is not where many cannabis reformers would like him to be. But he is not the 1988 or 1994 Joe Biden. ”