3:08 — CANNABIS ALERT! Leahy gets to it: “Regarding states rights. states have also voted on the issue of marijuana. Your own state of Alabama permits a derivative of marijuana known as CBD oil. Which is legal in Alabama, but illegal under federal law. If you are confirmed as the nation’s chief law enforcement official, you know we have very limited federal resources. Would you use our federal resources to investigate and prosecute sick people who are using marijuana in accordance with their state laws?”
Sessions answers: “I won’t commit to never enforcing federal law. But absolutely, it’s a problem of resources for the federal government. The Department of Justice under Lynch and Holder set forth some policies they thought were appropriate regarding states that have legalized in some fashion.” He added that there has been criticism of those policies, “some of them are truly valuable, but fundamentally the criticism that I find legitimate is that they [the Cole memo guidelines] may not have been followed. Using judgment in how to handle these cases will be mine, and I will do it in a fair and just way.”
Leahy: “In the past you have called for the death penalty for second-time marijuana offenders.”
Sessions: “That doesn’t sound like something I’d normally say.”
Leahy: “Would you say that’s not your view today?”
Sessions: “That is not my view today.”
3:13 — MORE CANNABIS. Sen. Mike Lee follows up with a question about federalism. “We’ve seen new attention paid to it,” he says, “but in the limited area associated with marijuana.” Did the way the Obama administration handled marijuana legalization sit well with you, in terms of both federalism and the separation of powers. Did the DOJ’s decision to not prosecute cannabis sellers and consumers in legalized states “contravene the understanding that Congress is the lawmaking body?”
Sessions responds: “One obvious concern is that Congress has made the possession of marijuana in every state an illegal act. If that is not desired any longer, Congress should pass a law to change it. It’s not the attorney general’s job to decide which laws to enforce. We should enforce the laws as effectively as we are able.”
This is correct in theory, but in practice the Department of Justice has limited resources, and its leaders decide which areas of law to emphasize and which cases to prosecute, and which to ignore. That applies to federal cannabis laws just as much as it does to insider trading laws, banking laws, antitrust laws, and other areas where large room for prosecutorial discretion exists.
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