Dennis Kucinich proved his antiwar bona fides over 16 years in the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat from Ohio and two campaigns for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. In a new interview with host Chris Hedges at The Chris Hedges Report, Kucinich discusses some of the pressure members of Congress are under that helps ensure that few members speak out against war like he did.
Tag: House of Representatives
United States Senate member Cory Booker (D-NJ) says Republican gains in the US Congress in the midterm election mean the lame duck session ending in January is crunch time for passing national marijuana legalization. “So it’s either now, or it might be many years from now” for legalization, concluded Booker in a post-election interview at NJ Spotlight News.
Ron Paul, in an hour-long Tulsi Gabbard Show interview with host Tulsi Gabbard that aired on Tuesday, shares several stories from his time in the House of Representatives as a Republican from Texas.
Ron Paul was a strong proponent in the United States House of Representatives of ending the US government’s war on doctors who prescribe pain medication and on their patients who rely on the medication to relieve pain. This war has been a subset of the larger war on drugs and one that is in many ways easier to fight than taking on actual drug-running organizations that use stealth and violence as tools of the trade.
There was a time when some Democrats in the United States House of Representatives would speak out against and vote against US wars. Sadly, the Tuesday US House of Representatives vote on a bill (HR 7691) to spend over 40 billion dollars in pursuance of the US war on Russia demonstrates that anti-war Democrats are now extinct in the House.
The Axis powers, including Germany and Japan, were the foes of the United States and other Allied powers in World War II. Decades later, President George W. Bush chose to term some other nations — Iraq, Iran, and North Korea — as a new “axis of evil.” That was followed by a US invasion and overthrow in Iraq. Decades later, US troops remain in Iraq, and US sanctions and hostility directed at the other two nations continue.
This week, the United States House of Representatives is set to bring the Axis designation back to the big time — seeking to lump China in with Russia as the new Axis powers the US should be devoted to opposing. The movement toward a new world war — the first one with nuclear powers on both sides — grows stronger.
Why hasn’t the United States Congress sent to President Joe Biden legislation to end the US government’s war on marijuana already? We are over four years into about two-thirds of Americans supporting marijuana legalization and majority support being reached among Republicans. Yet, the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives and Senate keeps failing to take the steps needed for Congress to deliver legalization legislation to the president. Why?
Seventeen votes from among 433 United States House of Representatives members. That is all the support for peace or free trade with Russia that was on display in the House on Wednesday when the House passed the Suspending Energy Imports from Russia Act (HR 6968) by a vote of 414 to 17, with two members not voting.
A year ago, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) was pointing out that the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act being used by Democratic leadership in the United States House of Representatives as the vehicle for marijuana legalization was actually delaying progress toward marijuana legalization on the national level. If the Democratic leadership really wants to end the US government’s marijuana prohibition, Massie argued, it should ditch the MORE Act with its extraneous provisions that turn off most Republican House members and even some Democrat House members and instead bring to the House floor a “straight up clean” bill eliminating the US government’s criminalization of activities related to marijuana.
The Democratic leadership did not follow Massie’s advice last year. Instead, it kept pushing the MORE Act, resulting in the bill passing in the Democratic-majority House in a very partisan vote but going nowhere in the then-Republican-majority Senate. In the new Congress begun this year, the House’s Democratic leadership is again pushing the virtually Democrats only MORE Act, designated as HR 3617 this Congress. It makes one wonder if the power behind the scenes either thinks the new razor-thin Democratic majority in the Senate will deliver approval of the bill or, it seems more likely, thinks it is fine to score political points with the very partisan bill while ensuring the US government’s marijuana prohibition stays in place.
Over the last two years, I wrote several times regarding the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, a bill that sought to legalize marijuana on the national level in a way that appeared to ensure almost no Republican House of Representatives or Senate members would support it. In particular, I pointed out how Republican legislators would tend to dislike the bill’s race-based provisions and marijuana business subsidies.