Is Marijuana Legalization Now Part Of The Political Mainstream?

Over the weekend, David Freedlander did a story for the Daily Beast on The New Politics of Pot: The 2014 Candidates Who Want to Legalize It. "Forget decriminalization or medical marijuana," he wrote in way of introduction. "Bolstered by state ballot victories, top-tier contenders in 2014 are seeking full legalization, the drug’s highest-profile advocacy ever… Advocates for marijuana legalization say the 2014 elections represent the first time that serious, top-tier candidates for major state and federal offices are advocating for full legalization of the drug.

The pro-pot candidates of 2014 have been bolstered by state ballot initiatives in Washington and Colorado that legalized marijuana starting next year and by a Gallup poll in October that showed 58 percent of Americans support legalization. It was a 46 percent increase since 1969, when the polling company first started asking the question, and the first time a majority has backed legalization.

But if legalization is as popular as advocates insist it is, how come more candidates aren’t backing it?

“Politicians, and I know a lot of them, tend not to seek out controversy,” said Daylin Leach, a state senator in Pennsylvania who is running for an open congressional seat in suburban Philadelphia and who has made legalization a central plank of his campaign. “You know the Wayne Gretzky line, ‘I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it will be.’ Well, most politicians want to skate where the puck already was.”

Leach introduced a bill in the Pennsylvania Senate this year that would have legalized marijuana. Passage remains unlikely, but if there were a secret ballot, he said, “it would pass overwhelmingly.” A conservative lawmaker who was publicly opposed to the bill, Leach said, told him privately, “I hope it passes so I can stop smoking pot in my living room and start on my front porch.”

The state senator is in a crowded field, but if he wins, he will join a small cadre of members of Congress who are backing full legalization. A bill introduced this year to decriminalize marijuana and turn regulatory power over to the states has 10 Democratic co-sponsors, and Republican Steve Stockman, who announced Monday that he was running for the Texas Senate seat now held by Republican John Cornyn, supports a bill mandating that the federal government respect state marijuana laws.

“We shouldn’t put people in the criminal justice system for smoking a plant which makes them feel giddy,” Leach said. “We are now requiring everyone, including our kids, to buy pot from behind the local bowling alley from someone they have never met before, instead of going into a state store in a strip mall, as you would to buy a bottle of vodka.”

The 2014 candidates’ pro-pot stance appears mostly to be a way for them to distinguish themselves in primaries where the candidates largely share the same views, particularly on social issues. In Maryland, for example, the candidate pushing legalization, Heather Mizeur, also is vying to be first openly gay governor of the state and is running a campaign designed to appeal to liberals and young people. Mizeur rejects “old paradigm assumptions about conventional wisdom and what is and isn’t safe to do in politics,” she said. “I am a candidate who never plays it safe. I always stand up for what I believe in. In the past, politics has been about catching up to where people are.”

In Pennsylvania, former governor Ed Rendell told the Daily Beast that he thought Hanger’s position on marijuana was what distinguished him most among voters with the Democratic primary five months away.

Hanger said he agreed.

“This issue alone could win me the Democratic primary,” he said. His plan would expunge the record of those who have been convicted of marijuana possession. “I would like Democrats to reclaim the word liberty or at least not surrender it completely. I put this issue in the same category as marriage equality for gays and lesbians or reproductive choice for women. To me, this is a question of individual autonomy, and it is rooted in some fairly traditional values of letting people live their lives how they want to unless they are hurting others.”

When Blue America is considering which candidates to endorse, marijuana legalization in not a question we have ever asked. We've been more interested in making sure our candidates back equality under the law for minorities and oppose neoliberal schemes like Chained CPI. But now candidates are bringing the issue up to us. Aside from Barney Frank, who was already in Congress when he started talking out about legalization, the first candidate who ever talked to us about it was Jared Polis, in 2008. We endorsed him, though marijuana wasn't the reason why, even if his forthright advocacy helped us to see his leadership potential, courage and willingness to buck conventional wisdom. Polis is now the congressman from Boulder and is likely to replace Steve Israel as head of the DCCC when Israel has another failing cycle next year.

As Freedlander pointed out, there are more candidates than ever who have legalization as part of their platforms. And without even trying-- or overtly considering the issue-- Blue America has endorsed many of them. Kenyan-born John Hanger is certainly one of our favorites running for governor of Pennsylvania and there's no way I could conceive a cautious conservative like Allyson Schwartz-- the dull, careerist Establishment pick in that primary-- to ever get out front on any issue that "radical." Ironically, the candidate who are backing in the primary to win the House seat Schwartz is giving up, state Senator Daylin Leach of Montgomery County, is probably the most outspoken advocate of legalization of anyone running for the House. Watch the video he made on the subject up top. "I don't know," he says, "how any progressive can say that we should continue a policy that is so harmful to our kids and so harmful to the minority community, and costs us so much money that we could be using on other things." You can help Daylin win his primary here.

And Blue America is big time behind two other top tier candidates aggressively calling for legalization this cycle, Heather Mizeur, who is running for governor of Maryland, and Maine's progressive U.S. Senate candidate, Shenna Bellows. You can watch a local TV interview with Mizeur about why she's calling for legalization at the bottom of this post. This is, in part, a guest post Bellows did for DWT just over a month ago:

A few years ago, as executive director of the ACLU of Maine, I was discussing marijuana policy with a prosecutor. As we debated, he started reminiscing about his days as a pot smoker. At that point, I had to tell him that I’d never smoked pot due to my severe asthma. He thought this was funny, but I was troubled by the hypocrisy. When the prosecutor who is locking people up for marijuana laughs about his own use, something is terribly wrong. And when our last three U.S. Presidents have acknowledged marijuana use at the same time that poor kids-- particularly young males of color-- are getting thrown in jail for the same activity, we need change.

As a Democratic candidate for the United States Senate, I support marijuana legalization. We need to end the war on drugs and reform our criminal justice system, and we cannot afford to wait. The United States incarcerates more people in total and more people per capita than any other country in the world, and the racial disparities are alarming. Even in my home state of Maine, which is the whitest state in the union, blacks are 2.1 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. Government spends billions of dollars each year enforcing counterproductive drug laws, which are truly the New Jim Crow. The economic and human rights costs are enormous.

Our limited public resources would be much better spent investing in drug treatment facilities and community education in a regulated system that promotes community health and safety. Instead of spending billions on a prison industrial complex, we could invest those funds in education, prevention and rehabilitation.

We should treat drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal one. Mainers have been using medical marijuana safely now for over a decade. I met a senior citizen recently whose wife just died of lung cancer. He told me that marijuana was a necessary part of her palliative care. His daughter risked arrest time and time again to bring them marijuana in her mother’s last months. Medical marijuana patients all across the country have similar heart-rending stories.

Maine is already a leader on marijuana policy. Maine voters overwhelmingly approved medical marijuana, first in 1999 and then again in 2009. Portland citizens just voted in a landslide to approve the recreational use of marijuana in small amounts for adults over 21. Now is the time for federal reform. We need a commonsense approach to drug policy based on science and liberty; we need to end prohibition. With your help, I will be a voice in the United States Senate for sensible drug policy.

Another Democratic Senate candidate, Jay Stamper, has a great deal of appeal to principled libertarians in South Carolina who detest Lindsay Graham's Big Brother/NSA-backing stands. Republican elected officials in the state are notorious drunkards and coke-heads… and hypocrites. This morning, Jay took it right to them: "I think it's time for politicians to put down their scotch and sodas and vote to legalize marijuana. Prohibition of marijuana, like alcohol before it, serves only to enrich and empower violent criminal cartels that turn our cities into war zones and corrupt our public institutions."

If you'd like to help Shenna Bellow's and Jay Stampers's campaigns, you can do it here. And Heather Mizeur's is here.

Tom Corbett And His Big Bong Theory

The Tea Party Tide swept a lot of toxic garbage into governors' mansions across the country-- Rick Scott in Florida, Scott Walker in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback in Kansas, John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Snyder in Michigan, Bob Forced Ultrasound McDonnell in Virginia, Nathan Deal in Georgia, Nikki Haley in South Carolina, Puppet Pat in North Carolina, Jan Brewer in Arizona, Paul LePage in Maine, Mike Pence in Indiana, Rick Perry in Texas... to name some of the worst of the worst. How do you actually name one overall worst though? Very difficult... but no one could leave Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett out of the finals.

Corbett has been a disaster for Pennsylvania and, par for the course, the Democrats would like to offer someone just a little tiny bit better (New Dem Allyson Schwartz). Pennsylvania can do a lot better. Polls show that Pennsylvanians do not want to see Corbett get a second term and that they will support any plausible candidate against him. We found two good one so far, John Hanger and Tom Wolf.

And as if Corbett wasn't in enough trouble with voters, on Monday his excuse for high unemployment rates in his state-- Pennsylvania ranks 49th in job creation since he's become governor-- is that his constituents are a bunch of pot heads. "There are many employers that say, 'we’re looking for people, but we can’t find anybody that has passed a drug test,' a lot of them," Corbett told a radio audience. "And that’s a concern for me because we’re having a serious problem with that."

John Hanger responded with the video above and by reminding Pennsylvania voters that the state doesn't rank 49th-- when just a few years ago it ranked 7th-- because of drug tests. "How insulting to the hundreds of thousands of people looking for a job or for full time work!"

"The real reason Pennsylvania has created zero jobs over the last 12 months is because Corbett is the one under the influence -- the influence of failed economic policies and Grover Norquist. He has slashed state funding to schools and communities, refuses to tax gas drillers, strangles the renewable energy industry, fails to fund repairs to our roads and bridges and turns down $4 billion a year for Medicaid expansion that would create 41,000 jobs.

"Rather than take responsibility for the failures of his own economic policies, the governor tries to blame the victims-- the people out of work-- for Pennsylvania’s poor job performance.

"According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Pennsylvania was the only state in the country to lose seasonally adjusted jobs between March 2012 and March 2013. The Commonwealth was 11th in jobs growth 2009 and 7th in 2010, but now in March 2013 Pennsylvania’s non-seasonally adjusted job creation ranking was 49th. We were 50th for seasonally-adjusted job creation. Pennsylvania’s job creation is plummeting even as the national economy created 3.8 million jobs in 2011 and 2012.

"If we just kept up with the national job creation rate, we should have added about 60,000 to 80,000 jobs just in 2012. Instead, Pennsylvania is the only state in the nation that lost jobs between March 2012 and March 2013.

"Tom Corbett clearly does not understand our economy or what it takes to get out-of-work Pennsylvanians back on the job. I do... Pennsylvania cannot afford another four years Tom Corbett. Let’s send him packing."

It Would Be Great To Get Allyson Schwartz Out Of Congress, But Is She The Best Pennsylvania Democrats Can Come Up With For Governor?

John Hanger

Allyson Schwartz is a champion of women's rights. Other than that, though, hers is a profile in cowardice. Right-wingers call her a liberal-- which her miserable voting record shows she isn't-- and she moves to the right. She's exactly what is not needed in the already dysfunctional political system. Pennsylvania would almost be better off with an outright conservative being pressured to move towards the center, than with Schwartz, who is already right-of-center and will always give in to pressure to move right.

A vice chair of the corrupt, Big Business-owned New Dems, Schwartz has amassed a putrid voting record, one of the worst from any Democrat in a deep blue (safe) district. On crucial roll calls, her career-long ProgressivePunch score is a pathetic 76.70. But since she decided to run for governor, she's begin following Boehner and Cantor much more dramatically and this session her score is an even more dismal 55.56. Some liberal! Good on Choice though!

There are much better Democrats running for the gubernatorial nomination. In the recent past we've profiled John Hanger and Tom Wolf, each one a far better choice than Allyson Schwartz. This week, Hanger made the case for not settling for a mediocre candidate like Schwartz:

Why not the best? Virtually all the Democratic candidates for governor are beating Corbett in polling, so voters do not need to settle for second or third best. Voters can answer the question, “Who would be the best next governor?” The media would serve the public by exploring this question, as opposed to focusing on the political horse race more than 13 months before the May, 2014 primary.

Governor Casey told me in 1993 when he nominated me to be a Commissioner of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission that the test of a public official is not that he or she won or gained an appointment to office, but instead what he or she did, “when he had the power,” to make life better for the people of Pennsylvania.

I have an unmatched record of accomplishments, inside and outside government, which demonstrates my ability to make change and get things done for the people and economy of Pennsylvania. This record of accomplishment shows that I will implement the policies that I am promoting in my campaign.

What I did in the past to make Pennsylvania better shows that I can and will improve public education; strongly regulate and reasonably tax gas drilling; create thousands of jobs through public-private partnerships in health care, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing; double renewable energy; protect our air, land, and water with a Growing Greener III initiative; and defend the liberty of all Pennsylvanians.

During my term as a commissioner on the Public Utility Commission, I:

• Saved Pennsylvania families and businesses billions of dollars by building a bi-partisan effort that capped electricity rates at 1996 levels for 14 years and ended electricity generation monopolies that allowed more than two million Pennsylvania electricity customers to shop for cheaper and cleaner power;

• Created customer assistance programs for struggling working families to help with gas and electric utility bills.

In the private sector, I led successful campaigns that:

• Passed Pennsylvania’s landmark Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards Act that built a renewable energy industry, created tens of thousands of jobs and attracted $3 billion in private investment to the Commonwealth;

• Gained overwhelming voter approval for the $625 million Growing Greener bond, the biggest investment in conservation in Pennsylvania history.

As secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, I:

• Enacted five new rules to strengthen regulation of natural gas drilling;

• Doubled natural gas well inspectors;

• Issued 1200 notices of violations to gas drillers and multimillion dollar fines;

• Wrote the moratorium on further leasing of state forestland for gas drilling that Governor Rendell issued by executive order;

• Supported and implemented energy savings law that created conservation programs and helped families and businesses save billions on electricity bills;

• Implemented the Pennsylvania Sunshine Program that built 6000 solar energy projects.

I have managed two critical state agencies-- the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection-- with thousands of employees and budgets totaling $800 million.

Campaign slogans and promises must be backed up by demonstrated ability to lead. My 28-year career in public service both inside and outside government shows that I have the ability, executive experience, accomplishments, fact-based ideas and the compassion to be Pennsylvania’s next governor.

Is Pennsylvania Ready For A Kenyan-Born Governor? Meet John Hanger

According to the latest PPP polling Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett has a problem. Only 27% of the state's voters think he's doing a good job. Over half think he isn't. But when it comes to one-on-one match-ups, the Democrats will have to pick a strong candidate and work really had to beat Corbett in 2014. These are the Democrats PPP asked about with the percentages who would pick Corbett first and each of them second.

• Former Gov. Ed Rendell- 40-42%
• Attorney General Kathleen Kane- 42-42%
• Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter- 41-38%
• Former Environmental Protection Secretary John Hanger- 42-37%
• Former Congressman Joe Sestak- 42-36%
• State Treasurer Rob McCord- 41-35%
• New Dem vice chair, Rep. Allyson Schwartz- 41-34%
• Former Revenue Secretary Tom Wolf- 41-29%

Just this week a Republican-friendly polling firm finds Sestak way out ahead in a Democratic primary match-up. It's too early to endorse anyone yet. Sestak is a longtime friend of this blog and Blue America has worked for his elections in the past. Tom Wolf and John Hanger are sterling progressives who would catapult Pennsylvania into the ranks of state government superstardom. Any of those three would be far preferable to Establishment hack and corporate shill Allyson Schwartz, who the Republicans are hoping for, since she is basically unelectable statewide.

I spoke with Environmental Protection Secretary Hanger this week and was knocked over by what a smart, solution-oriented candidate he is. He's on the right side of every issue and for all the right reasons. We'll invite the other progressives to do the same but I asked John to introduce himself with a guest post:

John Hanger, A Guest Post

Born In Kenya, and getting off a plane from Ireland as a 12-year old boy at JFK Airport in New York in 1970, I went into the public schools as an immigrant to America. The public schools welcomed me and all children and prepared me for higher education.

In 1977, I became a citizen of the United States and graduated from Duke University in 1979, having majored in Public Policy and history. My first job was as Executive Director of a small non-profit in Nebraska called Nebraskans United For Food that worked to address hunger right here in the USA by supporting food and nutrition programs like school meals and food stamps.

By 1981 I moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to attend law school at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, where federal student loans became essential following the death of my dad that changed radically my family's financial situation. Thanks to those student loans I graduated from law school in 1984 and got my dream job at Community Legal Services, representing low-income families in Philadelphia.

At CLS I was in the Energy Project advocating for families and businesses for whom utility bills were unaffordable. I saw the horrendous impact that shutting off electricity and gas service can have, as families turned to dangerous substitutes like candles and portable heaters that did cause fires that injured and killed poor people and especially children.

In 1986, I was appointed the Public Advocate to represent all the customers of Philadelphia's municipal gas, water, and sewer utilities and my first opportunity for public service had arrived. By 1993, Governor Casey appointed me to be a Commissioner of the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission where I took on the problem posed by electricity rates among the 10 highest in the nation. Leading a major utility reform effort, I won a 14-year electricity rate cap for all electricity utilities in Pennsylvania. I initiated new programs to provide assistance to low-income families by offering them electricity and gas bills based on their incomes. And I boosted energy conservation programs that cut usage and made bills more affordable.

From 1998 to 2008, I was the President of Citizens for Pennsylvania's Future that led successful campaigns for more renewable energy, more energy efficiency, and more investment for cleaning up streams, preserving farms, and improving parks. Pennsylvania became a leader in renewable energy and energy efficiency during this time. I personally played a leading role in enacting Pennsylvania's 2004 Renewable Portfolio Standard, its 2005 Growing Greener $645 million environmental bond program, its 2008 $600 million Act 1 clean energy fund, and its 2008 Act 129 Energy Efficiency requirement that required electricity utilities to invest $2 billion in conserving electricity.

Nobody in Pennsylvania has done more to build wind, solar, and energy efficiency than me.

From 2008 to 2011, I served as the Secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, where I enacted 5 new regulations strengthening rules governing gas drilling, more than doubled the number of staff overseeing gas drilling, and issued 1200 violations to the gas industry just in 2010. I also worked to pass a real gas drilling tax and crafted an executive order imposing a moratorium on further leasing of state forest land for gas drilling, a moratorium that continues.

While Secretary I also chaired the committee that wrote Pennsylvania's 2010 Climate Action Plan that would cut Pennsylvania's carbon emissions by one-third and create 62,000 jobs.

I have an unmatched record of working on state policy and state government. I have a record of accomplishment that benefits workers, poor families, clean energy, the environment. I am a proved tough, professional, independent regulator.

My campaign builds on this experience and is taking the fight to Corbett who seeks to privatize public schools by slashing funding, sending blank checks to poor performing charter schools, and supporting vouchers. By contrast, I will restore the $1 billion cut from public education by Corbett, end charters for poor performing charter schools, and oppose vouchers.

Governor Corbett's jobs record is a disaster, with Pennsylvania one of just 4 states where the unemployment rate did not decline in 2012 compared to 2011. In part, Pennsylvania's poor jobs performance is because Corbett has destroyed 19,000 education jobs and because Corbett sees gas drilling as adequate to bring broad prosperity to Pennsylvania. It is not, as gas drilling has created less than 2% of the 6.5 million jobs Pennsylvania needs.

My campaign recognizes that Pennsylvania must have strong public-private partnerships that boost jobs in education, health care, manufacturing, clean energy, transportation, agriculture, water and sewer, and tourism. To fund these initiatives I support a gas drilling tax and other means of raising revenues.

My campaign further will doube the amount of renewable energy and energy efficiency. It will support more investment in environmental protectiona and improvement like the 2005 Growing Greener bond program.

I further will reverse Corbett's refusal to expand Medicaid and by so doing create 41,200 jobs.

Finally, I have been leading efforts to hold Corbett accountable for taking valuable gifts from lobbyists and businessmen that shreds the existing gift ban that has been in place since 1980.