Attorney General Eric Holder.Pete Marovich/ZumaPress.com
Attorney General Eric Holder’s appearance before the House Judiciary Committee went exactly like you’d expect. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) grilled him on the excessive redaction of emails he’d requested relating to Secretary of Labor-nominee Tom Perez. Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) grilled him on the investigation into leaked intelligence on the Benghazi attack. Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) grilled him on his failure to recuse himself in writing from said leak investigation. Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said some crazy things about asparagus.
But not everyone was as focused on the scandals du jour (or asparagus). In a rare moment of actual congressional outrage over federal sentencing guidelines and drug policy, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) used his allotted five minutes to question the administration’s near-total refusal to make use of its pardon power—and its continued prosecution of marijuana offenses. The money quote:
One of the greatest threats to liberty has been the government taking people’s liberty for things that people are in favor of. The Pew Research Group shows that 52 percent of Americans think that marijuana should not be illegal. And yet there are people in jail, and your Justice Department continues to put people in jail for sale and use, on occasion, of marijuana. That’s something the American public has finally caught up with. It was a cultural lag, and it’s been an injustice for 40 years in this country, to take people’s liberty for something that was similar to alcohol. You have continued what is allowing the Mexican cartels power, and the power to make money, ruin Mexico, hurt our country, by having a prohibition in the late 20th- and 21st-century. We saw it didn’t work in this country in the ’20s, we remedied it. This is the time to remedy this prohibition, and I would hope you would do so.
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