The federal government currently classifies marijuana as a schedule one drug, equivalent to fentanyl or heroin. Biden’s changing that; Republican AGs want to keep pot a schedule one drug. Quite aside from the stupidity of their position, I don’t see how this is in any way something state governments get to weigh in on — but maybe the right-wingers Trump’s put into the courts will take up the cause.
I wonder if part of it is that drug seizures can lead to lucrative asset forfeiture cases — something the Supreme Court has made even more corrupt.
Treating bong water as a controlled substance may put one woman in prison for 30 years.
SCOTUS decisions have made it much easier for courts not to defer to the federal government’s regulatory positions. One court of appeals has cited that as the basis for overturning a pipeline-approval decision. I imagine the Supreme Court won’t agree if the case reaches them.
Speaking of SCOTUS, LGM argues Clarence Thomas can’t stand the post-Civil War “reconstruction” amendments as they get in the way of his reactionary view of America. Instead they’re “artificial, quasi-illegitimate incursions on the majesty of the law itself, that should therefore be read in the most narrow way possible, to minimize the damage done to the organic splendor of the law (meaning, of course, the judges’ own creation and extension of that law via adjudication).
Sam Alito gets more reactionary and dangerous the more he loses. He’s also a whiner who hates he can’t sell out without being called on it. Or without being called on being in the tank for Republicans.
Alito and Thomas are too compromised to weigh in on J6 related cases — but will anyone stop them? More here.
Then there’s Judge Aileen Cannon.
The FBI investigated whether Egypt had paid Trump $10 million illegally. Former AG William Barr shut the investigation down.
“A Texas woman was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison for her role in a Ponzi scheme, in which she helped a Christian radio host bilk elderly listeners out of millions of dollars, prosecutors said.” Nice to see justice served once in a while.
Much less justice here: an exonerated Missouri man was almost out of prison when the state attorney general got the state Supreme Court to keep him locked up. Nor here: “Mr. Roberson is an innocent father who has spent over 20 years on Texas’s death row for a crime that never occurred and a conviction based on the outdated and now debunked shaken baby hypothesis.”
“Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.”
