Following former President Donald Trump’s recent announcement of support for a cannabis legalization ballot measure in Florida, the campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris is working to remind voters that while in office, Trump “took marijuana reform backwards.”
In an memo from a senior campaign spokesperson, the Harris campaign accused Trump of “brazen flip flops” on cannabis. The Democratic campaign says it’s one of the Republican former president’s “several bewildering ‘policy proposals’ that deserve real scrutiny.”
“On issue after issue, Trump is saying one thing after having done another,” the memo says. “For example: As a candidate in 2024, he suggests he is for decriminalizing marijuana – but as President, his own Justice Department cracked down on marijuana offenses.”
The claim appears to be a reference to the move by Trump-era Attorney General Jeff Sessions to rescind the so-called Cole memo, which provided guidance to federal prosecutors not to interfere with operations of well regulated state marijuana systems.
Although the change did not lead to a broad prosecutorial crackdown on cannabis, it caused widespread alarm and uncertainty at the time, with many in industry and state government worried that it signaled a shift away from the federal government’s tolerance of state-legal marijuana programs.
“Trump now suggests he is for legalizing marijuana – but as President, his own Justice Department cracked down on marijuana offenses,” says the memo, which was first reported by ABC News. “Trump’s Administration took marijuana reform backwards, withdrawing guidelines to limit prosecutions of marijuana offenses that were legal under state laws. Trump even proposed removing medical marijuana protections.”
“Let’s be blunt,” it adds: “Trump is just making stuff up. And he hopes we will all memory hole his actual record and only pay attention to his shallow words.”
The memo argues that Trump’s latest position on marijuana is one of a number of issues on which the former president is flip-flopping, along with matters such as in vitro fertilization (IVF), the federal Child Tax Credit and how to tax workers.
Notably, while the new memo draws on Trump’s inconsistency on cannabis policy and messaging, it does not lay out the Harris campaign’s own vision on the issue of marijuana. Nor does it acknowledge the Biden-Harris administration’s mixed record on reform.
While Harris has advocated for cannabis legalization, President Joe Biden (D) has maintained opposition to that broader reform despite the fact that the vast majority of voters in his party support it, albeit while initiating a review into marijuana’s scheduling status and issuing mass pardons to people who committed possession offenses.
Nevertheless, Harris has a more defined position on cannabis issues than does Trump heading into November’s election. While critics, including Trump, have been quick to point to Harris’s prosecutorial record on marijuana, she also sponsored a comprehensive legalization bill in the Senate and called for legalization as recently as March during a closed-door meeting with cannabis pardon recipients.
Harris also selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) as her running mate, choosing a politician who backed numerous cannabis reform measures in Congress, called for an end to prohibition when he was running for governor and then signed a comprehensive legalization bill into law in 2023.
Trump, for his part, later criticized Sessions’s decision to rescind the Cole memo and suggested the move should be reversed, though in office he also failed to take meaningful action to further marijuana reform.
On several occasions, he released signing statements on spending legislation stipulating that he reserved the right to ignore a long-standing budget rider that prohibits the Justice Department from using its funds to interfere with state-legal medical marijuana programs.
Trump did at one point, however, tentatively endorse a bipartisan bill to codify federal policy respecting states’ rights to legalize.
The attacks from Harris continue a line of attack Democrats have been using for months now on the campaign trail.
In May, before Biden announced he would not seek re-election, his campaign highlighted the “stark contrast with the Trump administration’s failures and broken promises on criminal justice reform and marijuana.”
That email, which was sent hours after the president announced the “monumental” step to reclassify cannabis, compared the Biden administration’s push to move marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) with the elimination of federal cannabis enforcement guidance under Trump.
“Trump and his administration took marijuana reform backwards, withdrawing guidelines to limit prosecutions of marijuana offenses that were legal under state laws,” the campaign said, repeating a point it made a month earlier in a separate email promoting an event with Harris and cannabis pardon recipients at the White House.
“It’s simple, Joe Biden smokes sleepy Don on delivering for the American people,” Biden-Harris 2024 Spokesperson James Singer said. “After four years of all talk, all failure from Donald Trump, Joe Biden is keeping his promise on marijuana policy, moving America forward, and making America safer.”
Rescheduling marijuana was among Biden’s 2020 campaign promises, though advocates remain frustrated that he’s yet to follow through on a separate pledge to federally decriminalize cannabis.
And while the campaign is criticizing the rescission of the federal marijuana guidance, the Justice Department under Biden has yet to reissue any updated guidance—despite Attorney General Merrick Garland saying in June 2022 that DOJ would be addressing the issue “in the days ahead.”
When Garland was asked about the issue during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last March, he said that it was “fair to expect” that the updated marijuana policy would be “very close to what was done in the Cole Memorandum.”
Two Democratic congressional lawmakers said in a letter to Garland in March that it is “unacceptable” that the Justice Department has yet to reissue the federal marijuana enforcement guidance to discourage interference in state cannabis programs, leaving Americans in a “legal limbo” despite promises to update the policy.
As for the cannabis rescheduling process, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) last month announced that it’s scheduled a hearing to consider differing expert opinions on the proposal—an extra procedural step that will take place after the November election.
The hearing will be held on December 2, according to a notice set to be published in the Federal Register on Thursday.
Read the full Harris campaign memo below:
To: Interested PartiesFrom: Ian Sams, Harris for President Senior SpokespersonDate: Saturday, August 31, 2024Subject: Trump’s Brazen Flip Flops, Pandering, and Policy Dishonesty
Over the past week or so, there has been significant media scrutiny of Vice President Kamala Harris’s positions on a range of issues in this election. They were the focus of a large portion of her first national TV interview as the Democratic nominee on CNN Thursday night, and she answered clearly about where she stands and why.
At the same time, former President Donald Trump has made several bewildering “policy proposals” that deserve real scrutiny – the latest unveiled just this morning.
On issue after issue, Trump is saying one thing after having done another. For example:
As a candidate in 2024, he suggests he is for decriminalizing marijuana – but as President, his own Justice Department cracked down on marijuana offenses.
As a candidate in 2024, he has thrown out a vague promise to pay for everyone’s IVF treatment – despite the fact his own platform could effectively ban IVF, and his own running mate voted against IVF protections on the Senate floor just a few months ago.
As a candidate in 2024, he keeps proclaiming “no tax on tips” – after pushing regulations as President that would have stolen more than $700 million a year from tipped workers to let bosses keep their workers’ tips.
As a candidate in 2024, he and his running mate JD Vance say they want to expand the Child Tax Credit – but for years, Republicans have blocked doing that.
Let’s be blunt: Trump is just making stuff up. And he hopes we will all memory hole his actual record and only pay attention to his shallow words.
He is running on a dangerous Project 2025 agenda that the American people oppose, and as soon as Trump starts catching heat for his unpopular agenda and record, he rushes out to claim he would actually do the opposite. It’s a desperate play from a candidate whose back is up against the wall running against Vice President Harris.
But it demands scrutiny. He was President for four years, and how he exercised his power on these issues is the best metric for how he will do so again if he gets the chance. What he says now is just desperate pandering from a scared man who is worried he will lose.
So let’s take a look at his actual record on just a few of these key issues:
1) As of this morning, Trump now suggests he is for legalizing marijuana – but as President, his own Justice Department cracked down on marijuana offenses.
Trump’s Administration took marijuana reform backwards, withdrawing guidelines to limit prosecutions of marijuana offenses that were legal under state laws. Trump even proposed removing medical marijuana protections.
2) Trump claims he will provide free IVF treatment – but his platform could effectively ban it.
Donald Trump’s own platform – linked on his campaign website – could effectively ban IVF by establishing so-called “fetal personhood.”
Here is how The 19th News described it: “If established by legislation, fetal personhood would have the practical effect of prohibiting abortion at all stages of pregnancy. Its impact could become national if courts affirm state-level laws that extend the application of the 14th Amendment to fetuses. … Fetal personhood is widely seen as being in conflict with in vitro fertilization (IVF), which creates embryos outside of the uterus that are later implanted. Fetal personhood bestows the same rights currently reserved for people to embryos from the moment of fertilization. The GOP platform said the party supports ‘mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF (fertility treatments).’ It does not explain how they plan to support IVF while also supporting fetal personhood policies that would render it illegal.”
As President, Trump appointed an anti-IVF judge to a lifetime federal judicial appointment. He even added her to a list of potential Supreme Court picks.
Trump’s campaign has refused to support national protections for IVF access.
Trump’s White House and campaign hosted the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice whose ruling effectively ripped away access to IVF in the state earlier this year.
Trump has deep ties to the anti-IVF movement.
Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, voted against IVF protections in the Senate just a few months ago.
3) Trump is now pushing a vow of “no tax on tips” – but when he was President, the Trump administration enacted a regulation that stole $700 million a year from tipped workers to let bosses keep their workers’ tips.
Donald Trump’s administration enacted a rule that stole over $700 million a year from tipped workers and put it in the pockets of big corporations and Trump’s rich buddies.
National Women’s Law Center: Trump’s Proposed DOL Rule Is Tip-Poaching, Not Tip-Pooling
Fast Company: A last-minute Trump administration rule could lower restaurant workers’ wages by $700 million a year
In fact, it was the Biden-Harris administration that had to clean up this mess.
2021: Reuters: Labor Dept. unveils rule rolling back Trump-era tip regulation
4) Trump and Vance suddenly claim they will expand the Child Tax Credit – but Republicans have been blocking a serious CTC for years.
Under Trump’s leadership, Congressional Republicans blocked multiple efforts to expand the CTC and instead passed Trump’s tax cuts, which “largely left behind millions of working families, while doing much more for high-income families” and “denied the full $1,000 child tax credit increase for more than 26 million children in low-and moderate-income families.”
JD Vance didn’t even show up for a vote to expand the CTC. His Senate GOP colleagues killed it.
Top Trump campaign economic advisor Stephen Moore recently warned he has “doubts” about the Child Tax Credit, arguing we can’t keep giving middle class Americans “free money.”
Like Trump, Moore also appeared to express opposition to the refundability of the CTC, complaining that “a lot of the people getting it don’t even pay taxes” and echoing recent claims by Senate Republicans attacking the CTC as nothing more than “cash welfare.”
Economic experts, including conservatives, agree that Trump’s Project 2025 agenda would raise costs on the middle class by nearly $4,000 each year and set off an “inflation bomb.”
THE BOTTOM LINE
Donald Trump has a long, nearly ten-year record as a presidential candidate, president, and now a presidential candidate again. With his back against the wall, he is suddenly pretending to be a completely different candidate, desperately attempting to memory-hole his past positions and rhetoric.
It won’t work. Voters will see right through Trump’s lies over the next 66 days.
Trump must be held accountable for his brazen flip-flops wholly at odds with how he governed as president.
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Paid for by Harris for President
Following former President Donald Trump’s recent announcement of support for a cannabis legalization ballot measure in Florida, the campaign for Vice President Kamala Harris is working to remind voters that while in office, Trump “took marijuana reform backwards.” In an memo from a senior campaign spokesperson, the Harris campaign accused Trump of “brazen flip flops” Read More