Tag Archive: “Congress”, page 3

The Prospects for Federal Legalization of Marijuana

Posted in society by Adam

6 January 201812 October 2021

There are enough Republican senators from states where marijuana has been legalized: Alaska (2), Colorado (1), and Nevada (1) to tip the balance in the Senate on a bill to legalize Marijuana federally (or, if possible, at least some compromise that prevents federal law from being enforced in states that legalized).

The House? 26 Republican members hail from states with legal pot:

Alaska (1)
California (14)
Colorado (4)
Maine (1)
Massachusetts (0)
Nevada (1)
Oregon (1)
Washington (4)

With a split in the House of 239/193 (3 vacancies), the tipping point would be 24 members, which makes it close (and assumes that all Democratic members would vote aye while all non-legalization-state Republicans would vote nay).

Given that eight states have already legalized marijuana, 14 have decriminalized, and 29 have medical marijuana, it is inevitable that federal-level legalization will develop. The question is how close is the Congress from enacting that.

2018’s midterm elections could prove pivotal in the House for the election of a body with enough votes on the matter. You also can count at least four states considering legalization via ballot initiative (Arizona, Florida, Missouri, and Nebraska) plus three more medical initiatives (Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Dakota). Passage would add more representatives to the count.

But assuming it does not, the question becomes how much leverage the legal industries, both recreational and medical, have to get non-legalizing states’ members to cooperate.

For example, the banking industry would see benefits to a change in law allowing for the marijuana industry to participate in the regular financial system. Given that the industry is poised to be worth some $40 billion by the end of the decade, that’s a lot of transactions and contracts for various businesses to profit from.

These subsidiary businesses, which include those who are supply-chain for manufacture, distribution, and marketing of processed products, as well as out-of-state home-growing/horticulture suppliers, all have some level of sway over legislators.

It’s not clear what would happen today, much less in a year or two, if the Congress took up a bill on repealing federal sanction of marijuana. Which gets to the other hurdle: leadership. Speaker Ryan is unlikely to allow such a bill to come to a vote any time soon. The dysfunction in Washington means that there are a number of high-stakes issues currently under consideration, with deals to be made or not. That includes the basic question of funding the government.

Such an environment is not ripe for an issue like marijuana to come up, so it will likely take one of two things (or both): the midterms turning the House into an especially pro-legalization body that’s ready to act, or AG Sessions deciding to crack down in legal states.

Paths to Tax Reform

Posted in society by Adam

12 August 201712 October 2021

The Republicans have two basic options. They can go for expediency, raising the deficit in the short-term for tax cuts, avoid stepping on any toes, or they can go for real reform that involves dealing with blowback from special interests and being fiscally responsible.

It’s a hard choice. The early signal is they will go for the coward’s cut, since they are seeking to use reconciliation and not starting from a place of bipartisanship. It’s the route used under President George W. Bush, which is why his tax cuts expired.

But let’s say they want to go the responsible route, instead. How do you deal with the real estate lobby that will count the sitting president among its members? Or the carbon fuel lobbies that will want to keep their own favorite tax toys? Or pharma?

One way, maybe the easiest, is to reduce all of their loopholes equally. If they all get a haircut, it’s hard for any one of them to claim they were singled out. And the stock reply to their wailing becomes, “We did it across the board, fellas. Suck it up. Walk it off.”

Now, some of those groups may find pressure points to lean on, but if they are all pushing at once, it’s possible that they create a keystone arch of pressure, all pushing against each other, and leaving a pocket that allows the thing to pass. The weak point, they keystone, would be the president, who would probably cave on real estate treatment, and the arch would collapse.

Another option would be a sort of parametric tax code. Basically, you would formulate a point system based on size of business (gross revenue, number of employees, etc.) among other factors. Then the business can spread their points among various tax strategies as they see fit. Some might have more points in capital investment, while others might have more points in employee perquisites. But the overall deductible income would be minimized, and the tax code could be modified not only to strengthen or weaken the areas of deduction, but to increase or decrease the points available.

We really do need tax reform, and if the Republicans would take it seriously they could do a lot of good. Nobody expects them to set the rates high enough, but that’s the beauty of the tax code: the Democrats or future generations can always increase the rates to a responsible level. Right now, it’s more important to see the code simplified, even if it means the rates aren’t right.

Gross Negligence versus Less-Than Criminal Malfeasance

Posted in society by Adam

9 July 2016

Some thoughts on Clinton’s email scandal versus the lack of acknowledged scandal surrounding the Congress.

The Clinton email uncovers some widespread ignorance of law, reaching to the highest levels of the Congress. The House GOP, in the wake of the news delivered by FBI Director James Comey, is out for blood in the form of some type of indictment of Hillary Clinton. If the Constitution did not bar ex post facto laws, I’m sure they would be passing them “in a few hours,” to quote Chaffetz. The media has also been seeking the juicy chance to tell the American people that the Democrats would face the unprecedented choice between running a candidate who’s out on bail and ditching her for someone else.

But the wisdom of law is that it doesn’t bend to the political winds, but holds up. It continues to exist right beside whatever politically expedient thing might be in the here and now.

If Clinton were an ordinary employee, or even if she were presently in the employ of the Federal government, she would undoubtedly be sanctioned for mishandling of classified materials (as would her staff). That not being the case, where is our pound of flesh? It’s not like the Congress could pass new laws that would obliterate the chances of similar issues in the future. It’s not like the Congress could look in a mirror and note that they failed to provide adequate oversight at the time Hillary Clinton was serving as Secretary of State.

But this is about Hillary Clinton, not Congress. Misdeeds lead to punishment. That’s how we’ve always done it. Never mind that we have no idea (and won’t until some future day when the emails in question are declassified) how severe the errors were. We still must find some manner of settling this score, a score we never would have known about if the conservatives hadn’t been so scornful of Clinton in the first place that they filed FOIA requests for documents relating to the handling of the attack on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. Again, where was the oversight?

Wait, wait. Focus. Clinton. Did she lie to Congress? Did she lie to the public? She said she needed only one device, and possibly someone hacked the server. And sent classified information via email. Unarchived email. Would a new law really help? I mean, it’s not like there are other problems we’ve had in the same area. This was just one person (oh, and her staff) that screwed up. And it’s not like we could just have a law that would require normal government business to be conducted through normal government channels. It’s not like our founding document recognized the need for such a normal channel and empowered the government to create a service for the carriage of correspondence.

So, get mad as you like at Clinton. Elect Donald Trump instead. Hit the earth with a meteor, why don’tcha? It doesn’t really matter, because at the end of the day she’s still just one person, and punishment doesn’t solve problems. If it did, all the people suffering due to lack of immigration reform; lack of action on police, incarceration, and guns; lack of price controls on health care; lack of infrastructure maintenance; lack of climate action; lack of educational reform; lack of poverty reform; . . .; all of those people would have solved all of our problems years ago. They are being punished not because Hillary Clinton mishandled classified information.

They are being punished because Congress is nothing but a shitshow. So, go ahead, punish Clinton. How could one more person suffering really matter when that unholy body of the US Congress can’t do its job? Since they write the laws, rest assured their dereliction remains less-than-criminal malfeasance.