As per a report from Marijuana.com; marijuana reform (including the temporary amendments protecting legal growers from federal drug enforcers), is not expected to receive any votes in 2017 in the U.S. House of Representatives. It looks like Republican leaders intend to keep preventing marijuana-related amendments from being discussed on the House floor at all next year. This is highly in part because House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions believes that these amendments are “poison pills” that will “imperil passage of the final bill.”
This is a big problem in the grand scheme of the legal marijuana market, considering that all of the necessary federal cannabis protections that have been put in place in the last couple years have been done by passaging riders in spending bills. Why did Capitol Hill suddenly become so cold to modest marijuana appropriations bills? It appears that a bunch of other controversial arguments in Congress have prompted federal lawmakers to completely close off consideration for marijuana-related discussions.
“Congressional leadership has taken up spending bills under relatively open rules whereby almost any amendment could be debated and voted on, as long as it was germane to the overall legislation,” writes Tom Angell, chairman of the Marijuana Majority. “But due to unrelated disputes over gay rights, gun policy and the right of transgender people to access public bathrooms, House Republicans began locking down the amendment process earlier this year so that only certain approved amendments can come to the floor.”
In the meantime; it looks like the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment that prevents the DEA from harassing law-abiding members of the marijuana community, will be renewed for more budgets. However; the Republican leadership’s approach to the democratic process practically guarantees that no additional measures, including those related to cannabis banking, will ever pass.
“Until now, it was not known that there is in effect a blanket ban on measures concerning cannabis policy,” Angell wrote.
It appears like the only way for a cannabis amendment to be considered in 2017 by the House is for the Senate to pass one; leaving it in the conference committee’s hands to determine whether it remains in effect. However, this is not an option that one can rely on considering it was one of these committees that turned down a well-received cannabis amendment earlier this year.
At the end of the day, there is a huge amount of confusion right now with respect to the marijuana legalization movement. Although the past election outcomes gave advocates hope that the United States had finally reached a “turning point,” the threat of the Trump administration putting an end to the legal cannabis industry with Senator Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General should be enough to humble the arrogance of this progress.
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