Tag: democrats

Democrats Wimp Out on Federal Marijuana Legalization. Thanks, Joe Biden!

It’s 2020 and the leadership of the Democratic Party still cannot get it together on marijuana legalization, which two-thirds of Americans support.

Pew

According to Pew polling data, support for full legalization crossed the 50 percent threshold back in 2010 and has been growing ever since. Much like support for gay marriage recognition, this seems to be a permanent cultural shift in attitudes.

But unlike the Democratic Party’s embrace of gay marriage, its leadership cannot seem to line up behind marijuana legalization, even as the Black Lives Matter and criminal justice reform movements highlight precisely how the drug war has led to the overpolicing and harassment of black communities.

Marijuana Moment reports that on Monday the Democratic National Committee rejected an amendment to put a plank supporting marijuana legalization into the party’s platform. The final vote against, 50-106, is almost a perfect inversion of the two-thirds of the public who want legalization.

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A one-party system: House Democrats and military spending

I recorded how each House Democrat voted on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and on Mark Pocan’s amendment to the NDAA (that would have reduced military spending by 10 percent). Then I compared the results to how much each of them took from the defense industry so far in the 2020 election cycle (via OpenSecrets). Here’s what I found.

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A Headline That Perfectly Encapsulates Mainstream Liberalism:

“JUST IN: Senate Passes $740 Billion Defense Bill With Provision To Remove Confederate Names Off Military Bases” reads a headline from the digital news site Mediaite, which could also serve as a perfect diagnosis for everything that is sick about mainstream liberal orthodoxy.

The Democrat-led House and Republican-led Senate have now both passed versions of this bill authorizing three-quarters of a trillion dollars for a single year of military spending, both by overwhelming bipartisan majorities, on the condition that the names of Confederate Civil War leaders be removed from military bases.

Unsurprisingly, Security Policy Reform Institute’s Stephen Semler found a direct relationship between how much a House Democrat has been paid by the war industry and how likely they were to have voted for the bloated military budget which also obstructs any attempts to scale down troop presence in Afghanistan.

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