An Oct-stoner Surprise

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

On Thursday, and with no leaks or anticipation, the Biden administration rolled out a bundle of marijuana reforms.

There are three planks: the first and potentially most broadly impactful is calling for a review of cannabis’ scheduling as a class 1 controlled substance. As President Joe Biden said in a video accompanying the rollout, that classification puts marijuana shoulder-to-shoulder with drugs like heroin, and in a more dangerous category than fentanyl.

“The process to review scheduling, that is really the big ticket item,” Doug Berman, executive director of the Drug Enforcement and Policy Center at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, told TPM.

Attorney General Merrick Garland and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, the officials who head the departments tasked with reviewing the drug’s classification, are both on the record calling for less punitiveness around marijuana usage.

“This is unlike prior environments in which petitions have been entertained,” John Hudak, deputy director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institute who has written a book on the history and politics of marijuana, told TPM.

Biden is also issuing blanket pardons for “all prior federal offenses of simple possession” and directing governors to do the same with state charges. While the federal pardons only apply to a limited pool of people — about 6,500 under federal law and “thousands” more under D.C. code, per senior administration officials — experts called it a huge step towards the criminal justice reform advocates have long urged. Many also think it will prod blue state governors to follow his lead.

It’s a sign of how successfully marijuana reform has been stymied at the federal level that this relatively modest package of reforms had the experts I talked to downright giddy. If this is the first step towards decriminalizing marijuana on the federal level, it’ll give states more leeway to keep marching the way they’re going — which, in many cases, is freer access to the drug.

Voters in five states will decide this November whether to join 19 other states and Washington D.C. in legalizing adult-use (also known as “recreational”) cannabis. Thirty-seven states plus the district have already legalized medical marijuana.

Against that backdrop, Biden has taken the most significant steps to date to catch the federal government up to where the states are already headed.

“It should not be understated this is the most pro-reform move that a President has ever taken with regard to cannabis in U.S. history,” Hudak said. 

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Kate Riga

Justice Delayed, Justice Denied 

TPM got results this week, revealing the story of how the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals failed to rule on a case for more than seven years. The matter was brought by a homeless man who alleged that an Alabama sex offender law violated his Constitutional rights. A district court in the case found that the law was forcing the man to live under a bridge, and found that two elements of the law were unconstitutional – that was in 2015.

Seven years after the appeal, the 11th Circuit had not ruled. Until Monday. Hours after TPM published the story delving into the delay, the court issued an unsigned opinion against the plaintiff. Justice delayed, justice denied indeed.

— Josh Kovensky

In Case You Were Living Under A Rock This Week

This week started with a massive earthquake for Georgia Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker: A woman told the Daily Beast that Walker, who backs abortion bans with no exceptions, had paid for her to get an abortion in 2009, and she had the literal receipts and even a signed “get well” card to back up her account. But in spite of its never-ending war on abortion rights, the GOP rallied around Walker in the high-stakes race for the Senate seat.

As Republicans were twisting themselves into knots to defend Walker, the Daily Beast crashed in with a second report revealing that the woman was the mother of one of Walker’s known four children, making the GOP candidate’s feeble denials look even less convincing. And now Walker’s only got about a month left to clean up this mess before Election Day.

— Cristina Cabrera

New Voting Restrictions Could Land Election Officials In Jail

Since 2020, state legislatures have introduced a heightened volume of voting restrictions to prevent the “fraud” Trump claimed stole his reelection. This year was no different: A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that lawmakers in 39 states have proposed at least 405 restrictive voting bills during this year’s legislative session.

Overall, 33 new restrictive voting laws have been enacted in 20 states since January 2021. The majority of them will be in place for 2022’s midterms, and many were inspired by Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about measures to expand voting during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The laws don’t just target mail-in voting or drop boxes, but also election workers themselves. At least six laws in five states add criminal charges—including felonies—for election officials. The laws “contribute to an atmosphere of fear surrounding elections,” the report says, “and create a risk that the people who run elections may be more concerned with avoiding criminal liability than protecting voters.”

— Kaila Philo