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Three days after California finally began recreational marijuana sales, bringing its $13.5 billion black market industry into the light, Jeff Sessions began rolling back the era of legal state sales by instructing federal prosecutors to ignore the Obama-era memo that directed prosecutors to mostly ignore marijuana-related crimes in states where the drug had been legalized.

By rescinding the Cole memo, Sessions left many legal dispensary owners, marijuana growers, and recreational users in the lurch, wondering how federal prosecutors will deal with their emerging industry going forward as the White House moves in the wrong direction.

Heres a thought: Instead of letting the Department of Justice dictate the countrys drug agenda, what if lawmakers actually, you know, did their jobs and passed a law? Congress could just repeal the Controlled Substances Actparticularly the part that classifies marijuana as a Schedule I substance with no accepted medical use.

Removing marijuanas classification in the CSAand beginning to recognize legitimate medical purpose on a federal levelwould be smart not just as policy, but also because it would remove all such power from Sessions, making his decrepit decision moot.

Somewhere between 54 and 64 percent of Americans now favor legalization or decriminalization. Support for medical marijuana is at nearly 90 percent. Representatives should take the views of the people seriously and recognize the part they must play in ensuring the DOJ doesnt tread all over the will of the people. Nine states and Washington D.C. now have recreational sales, and a majority of states have legalized some form of medical use, with no apocalyptic effects. Some studies even suggest opioid use could go down if weed were readily available as an alternative painkiller.

Theres an opening here for Republicans to get on the right side of the issue, and popular opinion. Yes, there are still curmudgeonly conservatives buying into the law and order, reefer madness mentality that has caused us catastrophic harm. But some older conservatives (former Texas Governor Rick Perry, Senator Rand Paul, even Baptist televangelist Pat Robertson) are down with at least medical marijuana, if not some form of decriminalization. Plenty of younger conservatives are prepared to go fartherper Pew, around 63 percent of millennial Republicans were in favor of legalization as of 2015.

I think the Cole memo let members of Congress off the hook, said Bill Piper, senior director of the Drug Policy Alliance. It made the need for statutory change less urgent. Sessions is essentially kicking the ball into their yard, forcing them to deal with it.

They just might. Minutes after Sessions move was made public, a bipartisan group of legislators including Republican Sen. Cory Gardnerwho joined every other Republican senator in voting for his former colleagues nomination as AG, but says he did so after Sessions promised him that he wouldnt rescind the Cole memo, and thus tamper with Colorados thriving pot market, tweeted their frustration.

Meanwhile, back in March, Republican Rep. Thomas A. Garrett introduced the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act of 2017, co-sponsored by Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, Republican Scott Taylor and a dozen others, including Republican Justin Amash. The bill would remove marijuana entirely from the hydra that is the controlled Controlled Substances Acta bold bill that has predictively stagnated since its introduction. Sessions memo could help force it forward.

Letting law enforcement worry about real crimes, and freeing up some of the money used to incarcerate low-level nonviolent offenders would be a boon for fiscal conservativeseven law-and-order types should back it. Conservatives should keep in mind that Americas punitive, rarely-rehabilitative system not only fails at helping people reform their ways, but the drug war has cost more than $1 trillion since Richard Nixon declared it 45 years ago.

Instead of trusting Sessions to sic an army of prosecutors on states, patients, and consumers in various states, Congress should take Gabbard and companys effort to repeal or amend the CSA seriously. Then, and only then, will they actually be representing the constituents they claim to care so much about.

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Republicans: Instead of Whining About Jeff Sessions, Legalize Pot

President Trump and congressional Republicans want Americans to think that their proposed tax legislation is all aboutincreasing economic growth.

Thats their stated goal. But the stealth goal of GOP tax cuts is to start down the path toward gutting the New Deal and the Great Society and if tax cuts pass, they might get away with it.

As I wrote in September for The Washington Post, theres no evidence that a tax cut now would spur growth. Yet leaders such as House Speaker Paul D. Ryan still maintain the fantasy that their brew of income and corporate tax cuts will mean faster economic growth and better jobs being created. Its an idea belied by Trumps own tweets, in which he routinely extols the economy:

Hes not wrong. But with near-full employment and a roaring stock market, you dont cut taxes.

When past presidents John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush proposed tax cuts on the order Trump now proposes, it was always when the economy had considerable slack: underutilized resources such as unemployed workers and idle factories. In each case, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, we were either in a recession or just past one. At times of economic slack, there can be a lot of bang-for-the-buck from a well-timed and well-targeted stimulus program. Indeed, when the stimulus takes the form of public works that will pay dividends for decades, it gives the economy a double benefit, putting unemployed workers to work at a time when wages, raw materials and interest rates are low. Its like buying something you need when its on sale.

If anything, by enacting a stimulus now, in the form of a tax cut, when the economy is near full employment, the government risks raising inflation, which would mean the stimulus generates higher prices rather than reduced unemployment when employers cant find additional workers to meet increased demand, they have little choice but to bid up wages, which get incorporated into prices.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said Nov. 14 that he was "optimistic" about adding the individual mandate repeal to the tax bill. (The Washington Post)

So, why do it? Because for decades, conservative intellectuals have pushed for big tax cuts; less to grow the economy and more because they want to starve the beast. They want to force a major overall spending cut that would be a political non-starter without first passing a tax cut that creates a deficit so large, something must be done about it. Spending cuts must be enacted, then, as they would be presented as the only way to pay for the already passed tax cuts lost revenue.

Americans for Tax Reform, for instance, led by starve-the-beast enforcer Grover Norquist, is quite open about its goals. The organizations infamous tax pledge attempts to ensure that budget deficits can never be reduced with higher taxes, only spending cuts. Other fiscal responsibility groups are passive allies. They care about deficits but tend to be far more concerned about slashing entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare than they are about opposing tax cuts. In practice, they ally with starve-the-beast advocates.

These days, if tax cut hawks nod at all to cutting deficits, its with the false promise that tax cuts bring more growth, even at lower rates, and thus more revenue available for deficit reduction. As Freedom Caucus leader, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), told Politico, What you have to do is you have to mitigate the damage by being as aggressive as you can be on tax rates, which would lessen the damage of our lack of fiscal responsibility over time. Good luck with that, congressman.

The stage is being set for an all-out attack on the welfare state the minute a tax cut is signed into law. Per an analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Republican budget already assumes $4 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending over 10 years, a euphemism for Social Security and Medicare. But no action has yet been taken to implement the spending cuts.

Indeed, as The Post reported Tuesday, Republicans just added repeal of Obamacares individual mandate to their tax package to free up more than $300 billion in government funding over the next decade that Republicans could use to finance their proposed tax cuts. As The Post also reported, the Congressional Budget Office has warned that the tax cut would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade, potentially leading to an automatic cut of $25 billion to Medicare in 2018 because of a law known as paygo (pay-as-you-go) designed to prevent higher deficits.

Republicans might find a way around paygo, but its a safe bet that once the tax cut is out of the way, Trumps Office of Management and Budget will begin issuing warnings about rising deficits, financial collapse and hyperinflation unless immediate action is taken to reign them in.

Which, in turn, may create a bandwagon effect that overwhelms opposition. Thats what happened recently in Kansas, where the GOP hurt revenue by misleading Kansans about tax cuts stimulative impact to get them passed. Right-wing economist and consultant Arthur Laffer, hired by Gov. Sam Brownback, portrayed the effect of tax cuts as if increased revenue from growth would take care of budget shortfalls the same thing that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin predicts from the Trump tax proposal when he claims, The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth.

In Kansas, when revenue collapsed, Republicans didnt respond by admitting error and restore the taxes that had been cut. They slashed university budgets, canceled highway projects and convinced reluctant lawmakers to go along with a plan to borrow $1 billion to shore up the states public pension fund. Eventually, facing continued shortfalls, Republicans voted to raise the sales tax and a tax on cigarettes which disproportionately hit the pockets of poor and working-class Kansans who had received virtually no tax cut at all. Only when spending had been slashed and regressive taxes raised did Republicans finally restore some of the taxes that had been cut.

By framing their opposition to Trumps tax plan as a worry that it does too little for the middle class, as theyve done so far, congressional Democrats risk playing into the Republican playbook by agreeing in principle to the virtue of tax cuts.

[The GOP tax plan will lead to more offshoring of jobs and a larger trade deficit]

Ive yet to hear a Democrat say that no tax cut is either necessary or justified by current economic conditions. While it is true that the middle class is suffering, its not from high income taxes, which are at a historically low level. According to the Tax Policy Center, a family with the median income pays an income tax rate of just 5.34 percent, less than half what it paid during the Reagan administration, even after the 1981 tax cut.

Trumps top economic adviser, former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn, says the benefits of the tax cut will trickle down to the middle class, an absurd suggestion. The rich arent going to buy second and third yachts just because they got a tax cut. And the idea that a tax cut for big corporations will raise wages is nonsense. Just this week, chief executivesbalked when Cohn tried to get them to agree that theyd invest in hiring if a tax cut passed. Wages fell steadily after the corporate tax rate was cut to 34 percent from 46 percent in 1986. They also fell in Britain when it cut the corporate tax. The tax savings will primarily go to corporate executives and shareholders.

Democrats should oppose any tax cut. And of course they should oppose slashing Social Security and Medicare by making these programs less attractive, it aids in their gradual abolition through privatization, another goal of the GOP. They may not have much leverage in the tax debate, but they should try to force Republicans to put on the table details about the spending cuts that their tax cut is designed to bring about.

If theyre worried about political cover, they shouldnt be: A Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday shows that by a 2-1 margin, Americans oppose Republicans current plan.

Once we can see the whole picture, Americans will have a clearer idea of the net benefit to them. The rich dont need either Social Security or Medicare its the middle class, which depends on both, that needs to know how tax cuts and spending cuts affect them. If Social Security and Medicare cuts follow tax cuts, on net, even those who would get a tiny tax cut will be much worse off when the spending cuts are factored in. This will give a true, complete picture of the distribution of pain and gain in the GOP program.

Republicans have played this game before luring Americans toward government downsizing with the promise of tax cuts. The best way to avoid getting played again is not to play the game.

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First, Republicans want tax cuts. Next, theyll try gutting ...

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firms testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. Its time to share what our company told investigators.

We dont believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trumps businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals dont seem to interest Congress.

We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manaforts coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the presidents men the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steeles work for us and were not sources for his reports.

Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steeles sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive and now confirmed effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and havent since.

After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January.

Were extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trumps Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.

It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firms testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.

Excerpt from:
The Republicans Fake Investigations - The New York Times

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Months of bipartisan negotiations in the U.S. Senate over the fate of young, undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers turned angry on Friday, with the lead Democratic negotiator blasting the White House for making hardline anti-immigrant demands.

President Donald Trump in September ordered that an Obama-era program that prevented young immigrants from being deported should end in six months. The program is known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

Saving the Dreamers from deportation is a high priority for Democrats, but Republican and Democratic lawmakers have struggled to reach a bipartisan deal.

Senator Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said the White House on Friday had submitted a list of demands it wanted in order to agree a deal that were simply a repeat of a document it sent to Congress in early October. Democratic leaders rejected those demands at the time.

Further inflaming the negotiations, Durbin said, was an added White House demand for $18 billion to fund the construction of a wall along the southwestern border with Mexico, despite staunch Democratic opposition.

On Saturday, congressional Republican leaders are due to huddle with Trump at Camp David, the presidential mountain retreat, to discuss 2018 legislative priorities.

Republican and Democratic leaders are also scheduled to meet with Trump at the White House on Tuesday to talk about immigration legislation.

Durbin said the latest White House move, coming as Congress also struggles to pass a bill by Jan. 19 to fund the government through September, could push federal agencies closer to a shutdown.

Earlier, some congressional Republicans downplayed the likelihood of a deal with Democrats on legislation to protect the Dreamers - some 700,000 young immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

Republican Senator John Cornyn accused Democrats in a tweet of trying to force a deal on Dreamers by doing a slow walk on efforts to approve critical disaster aid and defense spending.

Two other Republicans late on Thursday said the sides remained far apart. Our discussions on border security and enforcement with Democrats are much further apart, and that is key to getting a bipartisan deal on DACA, senators Thom Tillis and James Lankford said in a statement.

On Oct. 8, the White House released a list of immigration principles Trump wanted in return for giving Dreamers legislative protection from deportation.

Besides the border wall, it included the hiring of 10,000 more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and 300 federal prosecutors.

Immigration advocacy groups fear the hiring expansion would be part of an attempt to round up the adult relatives of Dreamers to ship them to their native countries.

Resubmitting the demands that were dismissed by Democrats three months ago, Durbin said, was outrageous. But he added that bipartisan negotiations continue among senators.

Democrats have said they are open to tying DACA to additional funding for border security technology. But they oppose Trumps wall, which government estimates have said could cost over $21 billion.

Republican lawmakers met with Trump at the White House on Thursday and initially emerged saying they were optimistic that they could find a legislative fix for DACA.

The struggle over the Dreamers carries political weight for both parties heading into the November 2018 midterm congressional elections. Most of the Dreamers came from Mexico and Hispanics tend to vote for Democrats.

Cornyn, in an interview on Fox News on Friday, said Trump would demand that an immigration deal address the visa lottery system and chain migration that unites family members.

Those are things that hes insisted upon, and Democrats would have to embrace them along with border security, said Cornyn.

Additional reporting by Susan Cornwell, Makini Brice and Susan Heavey; Editing by Alistair Bell and Rosalba O'Brien

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Republicans, Democrats joust over 'Dreamer' immigration ...

Editors Note: This piece originally appeared in the July 31, 2017 issue of National Review.

Republicans dont have many legislative wins to show for their control of the House, Senate, and White House. They have, it is true, confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. His confirmation, along with the thought of how Hillary Clinton would have used executive power, is enough to make a lot of conservatives happy about voting for President Trump last fall.

But Republicans hoped to have enacted major conservative changes in government policy by now. Congressional Republicans have complained over the years that their grassroots supporters have exaggerated expectations of what they can achieve. This time, though, the congressmen themselves have been disappointed. After the election, they too believed that Congress would quickly repeal Obamacare and then move ahead on tax reform.

That didnt happen. Action on health care has been repeatedly delayed, and the current betting in Washington, D.C., is that no major change to Obamacare will pass. Congress has barely begun to take up taxes. Legislation on infrastructure, which the president has consistently described as a priority, does not exist.

Republicans have been productive, at least, in coming up with competing explanations for their failure to change the laws. Many Republicans, especially those outside the capital and those who strongly support Trump, blame the congressional party for being weak and disloyal to the president. (A smaller number of strong Trump supporters insist that a few deregulatory moves by Congress, the Gorsuch confirmation, and Trumps executive actions, especially his planned withdrawal from the Paris climate-change accord, mean that everything is going well.) Often this criticism is couched as a defense of the president: If hes not signing laws, its the fault of Congress for not sending them for his signature.

Those Republicans who are more sympathetic to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan than to Trump most Republicans in D.C., in other words tend to blame Trump. In particular, they blame his tweets. When one of them becomes a big news story, it drowns out any other Republican message. Many Republicans in Congress complain that this White House is better at providing drama than direction.

Speaker Ryan has not himself pointed a finger at Trump: not in public, and not, to my knowledge, in private, either. He has noted that congressional Republicans spent ten years in opposition, first to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in the last two years of the George W. Bush presidency, then to President Obama. Many members of his conference therefore have no experience of passing federal laws. The partys stumbles, he suggests, are part of its transition to being a governing party.

Yet Ryans own ambitious schedule for 2017 underestimated the difficulties. Congressional Republicans arent just out of practice at governing: They face a fundamentally new situation. From 2001 to 2007, they were very largely pursuing the agenda set by a Republican White House. The last time they were setting an agenda themselves, as they are now doing by necessity, was during the Clinton administration. They have not set an agenda that they had a responsibility to turn into law with the assistance of a Republican president since before the Great Depression.

At one tricky moment in the Houses consideration of health care, Trump tweeted a few attacks on members of the House Freedom Caucus. The controversy that ensued might obscure the fact that he has generally taken a very hands-off approach to the Congress. He has said that congressional Republicans, not he, decided to tackle health care first. Ryan has pushed for tax reform to include a border-adjusted tax to offset some of the revenue losses other portions of the reform will cause. Trumps aides have not taken a unified line on the matter, pro or con.

Trumps management style, unusual in a president, does not require public unity from his subordinates. Budget director Mick Mulvaney and Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin have taken opposing views in interviews about how much revenue a reformed tax code should raise. Mulvaney has also said that the administrations budget does not reflect its policy proposals which left some observers a bit flummoxed, since putting its proposals into budgetary form has historically been considered the point of the document.

The president does not engage or seem familiar with the details of policy, either. Many jobs in his administration remain unfilled, in many cases with no nominees yet submitted. For these and other reasons, his administration has provided his congressional allies with much less guidance than is typical.

Usually, a presidential candidate runs on a fairly detailed list of proposals and communicates to his party, the public, and relevant interest groups that he intends to achieve something close to its top items. That list reflects, adjusts, and solidifies the partys existing consensus. When the candidate comes from the party that controls Congress but not the White House, the list includes many of the priorities that the incumbent president beat back. If the candidate wins, his party defers to his list.

In the run-up to 2016, congressional Republicans decided to rely even more than before on their presidential nominees policy preferences. Senate Republicans made a conscious decision not to put forward a comprehensive agenda, so as to leave the nominee free to develop his own plans. Ryan tried to supply some content, devising a list of policies that he called A Better Way. But the lack of Senate buy-in, and the expectation that the presidential nominee would have a more authoritative platform, limited the seriousness with which House Republicans took it.

When Trump won, though, congressional Republicans could not defer to his proposals, even if they had been inclined to do so for a man many of them regarded as an interloper, because his campaign was so light on policy. His health plan consisted of a few pages of boilerplate, much of it dated. (The plan endorsed health savings accounts, for example, without taking any notice of the fact that President Bush had already gotten them enacted.) His own administration has not drawn on those pages. He ran on one tax plan during the primaries and another during the general election; reportedly instructed his White House staff to come up with a new plan that mimicked a New York Times op-ed he had read; and then oversaw the release of a plan that could fit on a 35 card.

During the last few decades our political system has come to rely ever more heavily on strong presidential leadership, and a shift away from this model of an overbearing executive may be salutary. It has, however, also been abrupt. Congressional Republicans have been left scrambling to figure out their own role.

Perhaps theyre blaming his tweets for their travails as a form of displaced anger over their new obligations. The proposition that the tweets are undermining congressional work does not really hold up. Nobody in Congress is going to vote against a tax bill because of something Trump tweeted about Mika Brzezinski. And its not as though the president would make a compelling case for Republican health-care legislation whether to the public or to holdout senators if only he could keep himself from using social media to boast and settle scores.

Whether anyone could make a compelling case for that legislation is a contested question. The health-care bill is hated by many and loved by almost no one, in part because it does not reflect any coherent understanding of what our health policy should be. That may be the kind of legislation one should expect when neither the Congress nor the president has thought through a policy agenda. The health debate has shown that moderate Republicans, especially, never worked out the implications of the partys loud opposition to Obamacare, which they joined with gusto. If they had, they might have realized that it was impossible to repeal Obamacare while also refusing to modify in any way its protections for people with preexisting conditions.

The same lack of forethought is already undermining tax reform. Republicans think they have a clear idea of tax reform because they share certain goals, such as lower tax rates and better treatment of investment. But those goals can be pursued in many different ways. How large should tax cuts be? Is it more important to cut corporate or individual tax rates? Or would the economy be better served by changing the definition of the corporate tax base? Should concerns about the trade deficit affect our tax policy? How should Trumps promises about child care be integrated with tax reform, if they should be at all?

Passing tax legislation will not require starting out with a consensus on all these questions, let alone on the more detailed ones that have to be answered after them. But Republican lawmakers are quite far away from a consensus on them, and the vast majority of individual congressmen do not yet have a strong sense of their own answers.

It is a mistake, then, to ask why Trump, Ryan, and the rest are not making more rapid progress on the Republican agenda. That question assumes that Republicans have a clear sense of what they want and are confronting an obstacle to the realization of their desires: that theyre not getting their way because [blank], which could be filled in with Trump is being a maniac on Twitter or Ryan is a weakling. But the problem is more basic. The main reason theyre not doing much is that they havent figured out what they want to do.

READ MORE:Editorial: Dont Settle for Nothing on Health-Care ReformTrump Owns the Health Care FailureAre Republicans the Party of Bad Faith?

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review.

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Republicans' Washington Leadership Struggles with No Clear ...