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1. U.S. Rep. Kelly Armstrong, R-N.D., spoke out Wednesday, Jan. 20 against some of the first executive orders signed by President Joe Biden. The orders, including rejoining the Paris climate agreement, will sideline vital energy infrastructure and bring us into a one-sided climate deal, Armstrong said. The Paris climate agreement is an international accord intended to avert global warming, The New York Times reported.

2. President Bidens other executive orders include revoking a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would pass through states including North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska. This is an early mistake by the president and a nod to far-left environmental extremists, said U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D. I urge (Biden) to reconsider his approach.

3. Famous people with a Jan. 21 birthday include fashion designer Christian Dior (1905-1957); Kojak star Telly Savalas (1922-1994); comedian Benny Hill (1924-1992); former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (1951-); Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen (1953-2018); Academy Award winner Geena Davis (1956-); Run-D.M.C. DJ Jam Master Jay (1965-2002), former Baby Spice Emma Bunton (1976-) and Princess Ingrid Alexandra of Norway (2004-).

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3 Things to Know Today | Community | wahpetondailynews.com - Wahpeton Daily News

"Nobody bet on how many Team Members would become sick, says former Waterloo Tyson plant manager, Tom Hart.

In his first public comments since being fired by Tyson after 26 years, Hart said, I see that all over every headline of every newspaper. I hear it on the news. That is inaccurate.

Hart made the comments during a Zoom interview for KWWL's The Steele Report, which aired this morning on KWWL-TV.

Hart, and former Waterloo Tyson night manager, Don Merschbrock, also fired by Tyson, say the pool never existed in the way it has been portrayed in thousands of news stories across the country.

The alleged 'betting pool led to an internal Tyson investigation, headed by former U.S. Attorney General, Eric Holder.

Based on the report, Tyson fired seven Waterloo managers, including Hart and Merschbrock, who admit they created a spontaneous, $5.00 office pool, but that it was never about betting on how many employees would get COVID.

Their office pool, they insist, lasted just ten minutes, and was a simply a conversation among the managers about the completion of a exhaustive mitigation effort inside the plant. Hart says says they believed their COVID mitigation efforts in the plant would be more successful than what was being done across the community at the time.

Of the office pool, Merschbrock says, "We did have a pool. And, it was a pool saying our results, as far as positive cases, would be better than the community. It had nothing to do with how many people got sick or anything. We thought we did a really good job, and we thought our positive rate would b better than what was out in the community, because of all the mitigation we put forward to keep everybody safe."

Hart added, We did two types of testing. We did the virus testing and we did the serology. or the anti-body testing. What we were focused on was the virus testing, which, at the time, was better than the community, he claimed.

They had just completed several days of virus and serology testing at the Waterloo plant, where more than a thousand workers tested positive and four died. Waterloo is Tyson's largest facility, employing some 2,800 workers.

The alleged betting pool was one of 162 allegations made in a wrongful death lawsuit, filed on behalf of Tyson Waterloo employees who died.

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Fired Tyson managers say they did not bet on number of worker COVID cases, as seen on The Steele Report. - kwwl.com

Editors Note: This is an excerpt from Book Review Roundtable: Laws Wars, Laws Trials from our sister publication, the Texas National Security Review. Be sure to check out the full roundtable.

Richard Abel, Laws Wars: The Fate of the Rule of Law in the U.S. War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Laws Trials: The Performance of Legal Institutions in the U.S. War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

As the long post-9/11 era of U.S. counter-terrorism enters its third decade, it has grown easier to identify distinct genres within the sizable body of work assessing the legal costs of U.S. actions. One body of work has focused squarely on the damage counter-terrorism policies have inflicted on individual civil liberties and human rights, including how expansive surveillance compromised the right to privacy, how torture and abuse undermined the promise of human dignity, how indefinite detention of some individuals violated the right to liberty, and how particular acts of targeted killing violated the right to life. Such policies implicated, and at times transgressed, a long list of prohibitive rules codified in domestic and international law and designed to limit the kinds of things governments can do to people in the name of national security.

A second collection of work has looked at the damage wrought by the post-9/11 wars on legal and political institutions, on process values of regularity and fairness, and on the ability of legal structures to constrain government power or hold it to account. It is a body of scholarship commonly characterized by its attention to the much used and abused concept of the rule of law.

While the rule of law is today invoked with increasing frequency as though it is synonymous with the list of rules, the phrase classically meant something quite different. Rule of law referred to the core principles and institutional structures by which any lawful action may be taken and by which any legal rule may be applied, interpreted, or changed. Without hoping to engage the many libraries worth of scholarship devoted to debating what those principles are, few would dispute that they include the very basic idea that people will be governed by publicly available rules that are known in advance, are applied equally in all cases according to their terms, and are binding on both private individuals and the conduct of the government itself. In works focused on the rule of law, the concern is with how policies were introduced and implemented. Did the president have the constitutional authority to take a particular action? Did the secrecy surrounding government action compromise the ability to hold public officials to account? Were like cases treated alike, according to fixed or predictable applications of law, or did the government slip into seemingly arbitrary assertions of power?

Richard Abels sweeping two-volume collection fits firmly within the latter body of work. It aims not to catalog particular violations of legal rules after 9/11, but rather to examine how legal structures built for constraining power, inside the government and out, fared in pushing back against those violations. The answer he offers is mixed: [D]efenders of the rule of law achieved only partial victories all that is ever possible.

In one sense, it is hard to contest that conclusion, particularly when so many of the policies studied in Abels books, as well as the institutional responses to them, are still unfolding. Forty detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay, for example, while multiple legal cases involving those detainees are pending in U.S. federal court. Proceedings in military commissions are now entering their 17th active year. CIA black sites and enhanced interrogation techniques are formally no longer part of the U.S. repertoire, but 2016 presidential candidate Donald Trump campaigned and won on a platform that called for a resumption of such techniques. Efforts continue apace in U.S., foreign, and international courts to hold original perpetrators of torture to account. Analogous policy issues continue to arise as U.S. forces are still in Afghanistan and Iraq, and continue to carry out counter-terrorism missions in multiple other countries. The wisdom and legality of operations in putative service of those missions including, for some, the controversial strike last year against Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani remain a chronic part of the national political debate today.

Yet even within the existing record, Abels account leaves unclear what he would consider a more decisive victory for the rule of law. While Abel regularly describes failures to correct or punish government officials who violated laws as failures of the rule of law, not all post-9/11 excesses or accountability gaps are attributable to failures of the particular structural checks he describes. Or, as the examples below illustrate, they may reflect rule-of-law problems in some institutions but not others.

The distinction is not merely semantic. Calling an action a threat to or failure of the rule of law an accusation made with frequency and accuracy against the Trump administration can have serious rhetorical and practical effects. Just as false claims about the structural integrity of elections may destructively undermine confidence in American democracy, misplaced claims about the threat to structural legal norms can be used to justify extraordinary institutional responses that may themselves undermine the rule of law. Moreover, even where underlying structural or process failures exist, they may be the result of institutional deficits unrelated to failures of legal rules or norms. In those cases, viewing the problem as primarily legal in nature risks obscuring the need for other vital reforms. Quite often as was certainly the case in many of the governments post-9/11 errors there are failures of more than one kind occurring at once, and there is ample institutional blame to go around. As institutions today work to recover from the exceptional Trump presidency, it seems essential to make sure the post-9/11 story is told in a way that squarely diagnoses what went wrong.

Trading One Rule Violation for Another

Consider one of the episodes Abel invokes to demonstrate a failure of the rule of law: the Obama Justice Departments decision not to move forward with prosecuting federal agents implicated in the torture-related deaths of two detainees in U.S. custody. As Abel recounts, Attorney General Eric Holder explained the decision not to prosecute by citing Justice Department investigators conclusion that the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. Critics of the decision, including the New York Times editorial board, called the implications for the rule of law deeply troubling. Abel ultimately agrees, describing the failure to secure prosecutions for such offenses as the rule-of-law defenders greatest defeat. Because no court had been able to declare such conduct criminally unlawful or formally punish the perpetrators, rule-of-law [i.e., law] violators can keep claiming their actions were legal.

Having labored extensively to document scores of detainee deaths in U.S. custody since 9/11, including those who had been tortured to death, I well recall the acute disappointment of Holders announcement. Yet, a failure to prosecute seems an inadequate place to lay blame. Prosecutors decide not to move forward with cases for lack of sufficient admissible evidence all the time. And the prospect that there was insufficient admissible evidence to win these cases was unfortunately plausible. As my colleagues and I discovered in combing through the governments own investigative reports, the initial mishandling of evidence by various personnel often put ordinary criminal prosecution out of reach. Notwithstanding, for example, a U.S. Army medical examiners report finding that a detainee in U.S. custody had been strangled to death, the physical evidence that would have been required to prove his cause of death was destroyed due to the detainees body having been left on an Iraqi airport tarmac for hours in the blistering heat. Similar problems arose when multiple individuals participated in an interrogation over time. There might be sufficient ordinary evidence to establish the specific culpability of some participants, but not all.

Abel is entirely right to see non-prosecution in such cases as tragic. He would be equally right to call such decisions a failure of justice. But it is not at all clear that non-prosecution was a failure of the rule of law. On the contrary, for the Justice Department to attempt to secure a criminal conviction in a case despite conventionally inadequate proof would risk weakening the regular evidentiary safeguards that aim to make the criminal process fair. No ordinary application of the existing public rules of evidence in such a case would suffice. It would lead us away from the application of ordinary law, publicly known and equally applied. It would likewise risk damaging the credibility of the Department of Justice an indispensable institution, but not the one responsible for the evidentiary failures that made prosecution impossible. Torturing detainees violated the rules. Asserting state power to evade ordinary rules of evidence risks violating the rule of law.

If evidentiary obstacles were to blame for the decision not to prosecute, a rule-of-law-protecting response to the problem would focus on other ways to make clear the social and political condemnation of the practice of torture by, for example, imposing adverse career consequences on perpetrators of torture and abuse. It would also address any failures that took place at the evidence-collection stage by holding individuals who failed to preserve evidence to account through internal disciplinary processes (including the military justice system) and by strengthening the availability of those accountability measures, as well as the procedures and training that support them. There may well have been rule-of-law failures in those earlier stages. But whether any efforts were made to address those failings in response to the deaths Holder declined to prosecute is a topic Abel does not address.

Missing Policy Failures for Law

Other examples that Abel considers involve a mix of failures some attributable to different institutional failings, some more accurately characterized as failures of the rule of law. Take the original February 2002 torture memo produced by the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel. The infamous memo informed federal agencies that interrogation techniques could not be considered a violation of the criminal law against torture unless they produced a level of pain equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying organ failure or even death. Abel rightly identifies the memo as enabling those practices that resulted in abusive interrogation after 9/11. Parts of the torture memo can be said to pose a serious challenge to the rule of law. But it was not the implausibly narrow definition of torture the memo embraced that caused bipartisan legal condemnation and led the Bush administration itself to withdraw it. It was the offices claim without engaging the most relevant legal authorities that the ordinary federal criminal law against torture did not apply to constrain those acting on behalf of the president of the United States. Here was a rule-of-law failure in the extreme: An internal executive branch structure designed to promote adherence to the constitutions separation of powers (an allocation giving Congress the power to enact criminal prohibitions against torture) instead promoted its evasion.

Yet, the Office of Legal Counsel was hardly alone in contributing to the torture and abuse of detainees that Abel recounts in several chapters of his book. While Bush administration defenders touted the importance of flexibility in U.S. counter-terrorism, organization theorists had long recognized the importance of systems, planning, and process in security management and response. Indeed, while Abel criticizes vague and erroneous legal guidance and inadequate criminal prosecution for what went wrong in U.S. detention operations, it would be a mistake to view the prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, for example, as a rule-of-law failure alone. Among other things, as military investigators ultimately found, pre-war planning had not included planning for detainee operations in Iraq. Indeed, the 372nd Military Police Company the unit in charge of military police operations at Abu Ghraib during the period when the worst abuses were taking place was a combat support unit with no training at all in detainee operations.

It is entirely reasonable for Abel to focus his book on the performance of legal structures, rather than, for example, political or military institutions. But ignoring the multifarious causes of disasters like Abu Ghraib risks overstating the extent to which the failure belongs to legal structures alone. It may also obscure the importance of reforms beyond those that checks to the rule of law alone can reasonably provide.

Conclusion

In this era of extreme political polarization, it is essential to remain clear-eyed about the distinctions between official behaviors that violate the rules, and those that compromise the rule of law. The post-9/11 era featured more than its share of policy and organizational failures, and far more rule-breaking in the treatment of detainees than any good government should tolerate. And efforts by leaders and advocates to craft what remedy they still can for those behaviors should and do continue. But it would be a mistake to sell short the extent to which commitments to the rule of law in the national security realm remain. Despite stark legal and policy disputes over the propriety of the military detention of U.S. citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi, an alleged Taliban fighter handed over to U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to require that Hamdi have access to legal counsel and an opportunity to challenge the legality of his detention before an independent court. Even this past year, though members of Congress differed sharply over the wisdom of the Soleimani strike, one of the very few bills that won bipartisan majorities in both the House and the Senate was war powers legislation aimed at securing Congresss institutional involvement in any decision to embark upon a major new conflict with Iran. And despite Trumps extraordinary efforts to engage the uniformed military in policing domestic political protests, the bipartisan condemnation of those efforts, as well as condemnation from within the military itself, should offer some reassurance that America has thus far weathered the post-9/11 era with some core rule-of-law beliefs intact.

Where one can find them, such bipartisan expressions of a commitment to shared principles are essential in helping to shore up slipping confidence in governmental institutions. They enable officials to rebuild some muscle memory of what it is like to govern across partisan lines and to reinforce normative beliefs in laws ability to constrain power. And they offer some cause for hope that when the inevitable next set of rule violations arise, there remains a rule-of-law system still able, over time, to correct itself.

Deborah Pearlstein is professor of law and co-director of the Floersheimer Center for Constitutional Democracy at Cardozo Law School in New York. From 2003 to 2007, she served as director of the Law and Security Program at the Washington, D.C.-based NGO Human Rights First.

Image: U.S. Air Force (Photo by Tech. Sgt. Gregory Brook)

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Counter-Terrorism and the Rule of Law - War on the Rocks

Before Donald Trump began his run for president, there was a war against journalism in the United States. President George W. Bush used the Espionage Act and sought to jail reporters who refused to give up their sources, not to mentionkillingjournalists in war zones. When President Barack Obama, a constitutional law scholar, came to power, he did so claiming that he and Joe Biden would represent the most transparent administration in history. But then reality set in. During his eight years in power, Obamas Justice Department used the Espionage Act against whistleblowers more than all of Obamas predecessors combined. They continued the Bush Justice Departments war on journalists, includingthreatening to jail then-New York Times reporter James Risen if he did not testify against his alleged source.

Despite its prosecutions of whistleblowers, Obamas administration understood that use of the Espionage Act was controversial and widely denounced by press freedom organizations. Attorney General Eric Holder sought to implement some guardrails against spying on journalists, though the administration maintained it had the right to do so in some circumstances. Still, Obama commuted whistleblower Chelsea Mannings draconian 35-year prison sentence. During Trumps tenure Manning was jailed again for nearly a year for refusing to testify in front of a Grand Jury. Obamasadministration also declined to indict WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and at least one other alleged whistleblower accused of leaking documents about the drone assassination program. Trumps administration dug both cases out and moved forward with espionage prosecutions, which remain active.

Cyclists pass a truck with a protest sign reading #FreeSpeech with pictures of Chelsea Manning, left, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, right, in Washington, D.C., on April 16, 2019.

Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

Trump came to power following a political campaign in which he attacked the free press, adopted fascist slogans to denounce reporters, and denied that basic facts were true. Trump harbored a Nixonian hatred of the press and lived in constant fear of leaks, particularly about his personal finances.

In a clear effort to send chills through the government and as a warning to any would-be whistleblowers, Trumps Justice Department went on a rampage using the Espionage Act. Its first major prosecution was against a National Security Agency contractor named Reality Winner. The Justice Department accused Winner of leakingtoa news outlet an NSA documentthat showed Russian efforts to penetrate software used in some U.S. voting systems in 2016. Othernews organizations have stated that the outlet was The Intercept.Winner accepted a plea agreement to one count of felony transmission of national defense information and was sentenced to five years, the longest prison term of any whistleblower convicted under the Espionage Act. It was an unconscionable act by a vindictive administration.

The Trump Justice Department weaponized its indictment of Winner in an effort to smear The Intercept and to encourage the media to focus on other journalists rather than the contents of the NSA document in question or the unjust use of the Espionage Act. Unfortunately, many publications took the bait and played into Trumps malignant anti-press crusade.

When indictments of whistleblowers happen and FBI investigations are launched, journalists should scrutinize and confront the actions of intelligence and law enforcement agencies and assess what these attacks mean for the freedom of the press. Instead, so many media outlets seemed to want to aid the Trump administration in making this about what journalists did or did not do making the publication the target, instead of focusing on the secrets that whistleblowers exposed or the dangerous weaponizing of the Espionage Act by both Democratic and Republican presidents.

I believe that The Intercept made serious errors in its editorial process on theRussia story, and I advocated both publicly and internally for The Intercept to explain exactly what happened. I believe that some of these mistakes were preventable. At the same time, there were serious legal concerns that anything The Intercept said in public could be used against Winner and other sources, and our attorneys implored The Intercepts editors to say nothing. I understood the legal logic. Our editor-in-chief ended up making a statement acknowledging that we had failed to live up to our standards and taking responsibility for the institutionalfailure.

This was a complicated situation, and I believe the facts make clear that Winner would likely have been arrested regardless of any mistakes made by The Intercept. She was one of just six people in the entire U.S. national security apparatus to print the document in question and the only one to use a government computer to send emails (which were unrelated to the Russia story) to The Intercept. That doesnt absolve The Intercept, but it is an important part of this story that is seldom mentioned. And we all know the Trump administration prioritized punishing leakers and was willing to use the full force of the state to do so. It was disturbing that the overwhelming focus of the reporting on Winner bysome media outlets was not on the contents of the document she allegedly revealed or that the Trump administration was wielding the Espionage Act like a weapon in order to threaten any would-be whistleblowers. The lead prosecutor made the outrageous statement that Winner was the quintessential example of an insider threat. The Intercept deserved criticism and scrutiny, but the problem was that it often came at the expense of holding the chief villains of the story accountable.

Joe Biden speaks with the press before departing Charlotte, N.C., on Sept. 23, 2020.

Photo: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

President Joe Biden has an opportunity to right some of these wrongs. He should publicly commit to ending the use of the Espionage Act against whistleblowers. Congress could also amend or repeal the act so that it cannot be used for such purposes. Biden should also take actions to end the persecution of Assange and return to the Obama-era position that Assange should not be prosecuted by the United States. We thought it was a dangerous precedent to prosecute Assange for something that reporters do all the time,saidMatthew Miller, an Obama Justice Department spokesperson. The Espionage Act doesnt make any distinction between journalists and others, so if you can apply it to Assange, theres no real reason you couldnt apply it to [the New York Times]. Biden should immediately pardon Winner and secure her release from a coronavirus-infested prison. He also should drop the case against former intelligence contractor and war veteran Daniel Hale, who is facing trial under the Espionage Act for allegedly leaking documents on the U.S. drone and assassination programs.

We have just seen the end of a dangerous administrationthat openly waged war against journalism. For four years, the president of the United States used the Justice Department as his personal law firm and a political cudgel against his perceived enemies, including the press. Even if Biden doesnt agree with the principles I am advocating, he could declare these Espionage Act indictments to be the toxic fruit of the poisonous and discredited Trump Justice Department. And media outlets should remember the next time a whistleblower is arrested that the most important task for journalists is to hold those in power to account rather than allow themselves to be used in a government distraction campaign.

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Biden Should End Espionage Act Prosecutions of Whistleblowers and Journalists - The Intercept

In the waning, groaning days of the Trump administration, with nary a week left until it leaves office, the Trump administration's U.S. Department of Agriculture issued its final rule governing hemp production. While the final rule, much to the dismay of hemp farmers, leaves the Drug Enforcement Agency in their businessfarm bill be damnedthere are other reasons to be cheerful.

The USDAs final rule expands the harvest window before getting tested (at a DEA lab, naturally), allows alternative forms of disposal or remediation for "hot"hemp that is higher than 0.3% THCand raises the negligence threshold of THC before mandatory disposal up to 1% THC.

Related: Marijuana legalization could supercharge CBD at retail

The transition from prohibition to a legal and regulated system takes time, noted an optimistic Shawn Hauser, partner and chair of the hemp and cannabinoids department at the Vicente Sederberg law firm, and USDAs final rule is a historic step forward for hemp in the U.S.

Fellow hemp attorney Garrett Graff, managing partner at the Hoban Law Group, described it as a "two steps forward and thenstagnant" type of deal.

Related: 2020 election could raise the fortunes of hemp and CBD

Time will tell, said Graff, whether a new administration, secretary of agriculture and Congress, how quickly that progress and further work can be realized.

There is actually quite a bit of progress that still needs to happen. It starts with the new Biden administration and ends with guess who? Heres our list of 12.

Under the governing legislation, the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act, lies the loophole that the FDA can assert enforcement discretion around anything else in the Act. Specifically, the FDA can write in stone what has essentially been its de facto response to CBD in supplements, which is to let the market flourish freely. Announcing that would give comfort to large mainstream retailers and other interests to hop in the cannabinoid game with both feet in the deep end of the pool. This, many hemp observers keep saying, is what is keeping the market from reaching its full fruition. As of yetthe FDA has neither initiated such a notice-and-comment rulemaking for enforcement discretion, nor committed to doing so.

For example, the FDA wants to see amended last Congress H.R. 8179the Hemp and Hemp-Derived CBD Consumer Protection and Market Stabilization Act of 2020 (it will have a new number in the new Congress but the same title)to include only CBD and none of the other cannabinoids or other ingredients derived from the plant. The FDA wants to save as much of the rest of the Cannabis sativa plant for pharmaceutical intereststhis despite the agency essentially losing the plant to the unregulated people via medical marijuana laws (now numbering 36 states and four territories) and recreational marijuana (another 15 and three territories).

We know, we know. Not bloody likely. We give you this chestnut of a quote from the FDA that leaves no doubt about the direction it seeks to steer the hemp and CBD market:We are also concerned that by including these other hemp-derived compounds in the bill language, it could disincentivize potential drug development of these compounds and instead encourage the use of these compounds in dietary supplements. Cannabinoids as anything other than pharmaceuticals? Youd think "drug"was the FDAs middle name or something.

Could you imagine? The Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act was already introduced into Congress last year and actually passed the U.S. House in December. It died in the Republican-led Senate, but all Congress is now run by Democrats. It could go all the way in the 117thCongress. The MORE Act would remove pot from the Controlled Substances Act, eliminate all records of weed crimes and more. The MORE Act was considered DOA in the Senate, said Jonathan Miller, counsel for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable. But now that the Senate is Democratic, theres a lot more likes to it. We could see marijuana legalization in the next Congress. The MORE Act would instantly remove the Drug Enforcement Agency from meddling with hemp farmersand could fundamentally shift the supply market. THC would matter only in finished goodsthink kombucha: If you want the high-alcohol booch, go to the liquor store;otherwise, see the healthy beverage cold box of local retailers.

Whats more innovative than the cannabis industry in the last five years? Tesla? Consider this: delivery methods and activation times make a big difference. Think of all the different delivery formatsfrom tinctures and gummies to lotions and vaporizers. Different formats have different times to take effectvapes hit the body immediately, tinctures taken sublingually take a little longer, balms even longer to get through the skin andgummies and tablets have to metabolize in the liver before going into the bloodstream.

Brands that understand that different activation times and how long they last yields different results will prosper. Maybe a vape pen product is for acute anxiety. Maybe a topical is for chronic muscle pain. Maybe tablets are for daily wellness. Combine that with consistent source material, so consumers know what to expect from a product time after time, and thatwill give reliability to the market and help it mature.

Merrick Garland had his 15 minutes of fame when President Obama nominated him to the Supreme Court in early 2016, only to see Republicans stymie the normal process for more than a year in the hopes Republicans would win the White House in 2016 and could nominate their own judge. But Garland is back afterbeing nominated by President Biden as attorney general, and some think this could have significant effects. After all, it was Obama Attorney General Eric Holder who, not three months into the Obama tenure, in April 2009announced the Department of Justice would not interfere with states that have their own cannabis laws. Overnightthe green rush was on, and itcontinues to this daydespite first Trump Attorney General Jeff Sessions being a well-known drug warrior. Garland, said Miller, will eliminate politics behind the scenes and allow hemp to be an agricultural issue, not a controlled substance issue.

FDA could announce CBD upper intake levels per serving; this is actually a slippery slope. There is no other dietary supplement ingredient that has any such proviso or warning around upper intake levels. And the FDA back in the 1970s wanted to create a rule that any vitamin or mineral supplement product formulated to contain more than 100% of the RDA should be sold only in pharmacies. It took the famous Proxmire Amendment of 1976 to put the FDA back in its place. So we hold a jaundiced view of giving the FDA this authority.

Yet the British regulatory agency has come out with 70 mg per day CBD as being the upper safe limit per serving. We dont know of any CBD supplement that has higher than 70 mg per serving, so thiswould not cause companies to disruptively reformulate. But any number would give some semblance of legitimacy to food, beverage and supplement interests that the FDA is ready to authorize access to hemp phytochemicals. Oreos with CBD? Pepsi CBD? It would be the first new ingredient given access to the multinationals in half a century. It would go a long way to deal with the great storage experiment that was the 2019 overharvest.

Yes, to guarantee hemp crops will certifiably stick to below 1% THC. But also to help farmers in different regions and different growing conditions grow hemp best where they are. The high and dry climate of Colorado is a world away from humid, rainy Kentucky. You wouldnt want to plant the same seeds in both places. Farmers would love nothing more than to have a uniform yield and uniform compliance with their hemp crop. Thanks to the work of companies that specialize in providing stable seed genetics with value-added traits, the fledgling industry is almost there.

After farmers grow it and before either industry uses it for things like bioplastics, textiles or other building materials or retailers put supplements on store shelves, there is the processing of hemp that has to happen. It helps if facilities are close to farms. Right now there are precious few hemp processing facilities. Investors need to step up. And maybe government mandates around purchasing American-made sustainable materials can help. If only there was a president claiming to want to build back better.

According to a Vote Hemp survey, more than half of all hemp business respondents are concerned about regulationsspecifically, disrupting the CBD supply chain, criminal action against CBD producers and decreased willingness from retailers to stock CBD products. Were thinking banking guidance from the Treasury Department, if not Congress, would help. That way companies dont have to work on black market-style cash-only transactions.Plus, banks need to be educated because no legislation can force a bank to make a risk decision they feel uncomfortable with.

Interstate transportation guidance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture would help ensure crops can travel around the country without Barney Fifes in backwards states causing unnecessary problems. The hemp industry had hoped such relief would come from Congressional action, but Vote Hemp presidentEric Steenstra says Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Mike Crapo have been the roadblocks here. Perhaps a newly reformulated Congress can push this through now.

You, yes you. Cannabis needs you, and Congress needs to hear from you. Because while the hemp industry, which includes retailers, wants to see expanded access, there are other competing interests out there that do not. And you wont be surprised to hear that Congress often does the job of the highest bidder and not the highest good. Dont forget that we have consumer groups rallying against getting Congress involved, said Rend Al-Mondiry, attorney at the Amin Talati Wasserman law firm. We have some reluctant members of Congress that dont want to sidestep the FDA. Plus, we have the FDA asking for things like mandatory NDI notifications and CBD serving limits and also pushing for changes to DSHEA, and pharma continuing to shape the process. As a famous American poet once crooned, Theygot the guns but we got the numbers, gonna win yeah were taking over, come on!

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12 things the hemp CBD industry needs to succeed under Biden - New Hope Network