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Following up on Pot(ty) - Or (K)Not(ty)? - (1/2), I find this article by Jacob Sullum instructive:
Last week seven Republican members of Oklahoma’s legislature, including five of the most conservative, publicly criticized that state’s Republican attorney general, Scott Pruitt, for trying to reverse marijuana legalization in Colorado. “Oklahoma has been a pioneer and a leader in standing up to federal usurpations of power on everything from gun control to Obamacare,” they wrote in a letter to Pruitt, who last month joined Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to stop Colorado from regulating marijuana businesses. “We believe this lawsuit against our sister state has the potential, if it were to be successful at the Supreme Court, to undermine all of those efforts to protect our own state’s right to govern itself under the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.”
The letter, spearheaded by state Rep. Mike Ritze (R-Broken Arrow), was a striking illustration of the split that the ongoing collapse of marijuana prohibition has created among Republicans, pitting their anti-pot prejudices against their avowed devotion to federalism. For Ritze, the choice was clear. “This is not about marijuana at its core,” he said in a press release. “It is about the U.S. Constitution, the Tenth Amendment, and the right of states to govern themselves as they see fit. If the Supreme Court can force Colorado to criminalize a substance or activity and commandeer state resources to enforce extra-constitutional federal statutes and UN agreements, then it can essentially do anything, and states become mere administrative units for Washington, D.C….If the people of Colorado want to end prohibition of marijuana, while I may personally disagree with the decision, constitutionally speaking, they are entitled to do so.”
Pruitt and Bruning, by contrast, elevated their antipathy to marijuana above their fealty to the Constitution. “It is curious—and disappointing—to see a suit like this filed by two states that have taken the lead in defending state prerogatives in other policy areas,” writes Case Western University law professor Jonathan Adler at The Volokh Conspiracy. “It is as if their arguments about federalism and state autonomy were not arguments of principle but rather an opportunistic effort to challenge federal policies they don’t like on other grounds. It makes Oklahoma and Nebraska look like fair-weather federalists.”
Read the entire piece at the source.
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