With help from Gavin Bade
MALARKEY — Navigating the world of weed politics has been tricky for every president since Bill Clinton insisted he never inhaled. But it poses particularly thorny problems for the current White House occupant.
Joe Biden is nearly an octogenarian — four years older than Clinton. He’s responsible for the sentencing laws that incarcerated many small time drug offenders. He’s never supported legalization and only recently came out for decriminalization. One wonders when was the last time he saw a joint?
Biden also centered his presidential campaign on empathy, on the notion that people make missteps and should not be defined by them. He’s applied that logic to himself, noting that he no longer carries the tough-on-crime mindset that he put into practice during the late 1980s and early ’90s. He’s also applied it to his son, Hunter, whose struggles with drug use have been well documented.
“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden said during the presidential debates. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him.”
I couldn’t help but think of Hunter Biden when news came out, via The Daily Beast, that “White House staffers have been suspended, asked to resign, or placed in a remote work program due to past marijuana use.” The president’s son is writing a book detailing his battles with addiction. Joe Biden praised him for it, saying he “hopes others might see themselves in his journey and find hope.”
How could someone who says that also punish young White House staffers for using drugs in their past? What hope did the president offer to them?
Hunter, of course, isn’t seeking a security clearance. And the White House argues that it may as well be Haight-Ashbury when compared to its predecessors.
The administration doesn’t automatically disqualify applicants who admit past pot use, press secretary Jen Psaki noted. She also said only five employees were forced out for it, among the hundreds hired. A White House official told me that for the majority, but not all, of the cases “it wasn’t just marijuana, it was also hard drug use and other security factors that factored in.”
But there are still an untold number — dozens, according to the Beast — who are waiting for clearance, have been suspended or have been asked to resign, reportedly because of their weed consumption.
Mark Zaid, an attorney who deals with security clearance issues, said the idea of screening applicants for marijuana use is both impractical and outdated — a policy with no clear method for implementation and one that makes no sense given the admitted drug use of past presidents (Barack Obama, Clinton, and George W. Bush) and the current vice president. Biden, he said, should change it.
“This is top down,” Zaid said. “At some point in time a president of the United States will have to step up and say, ‘This is ridiculous. We have to change this.’”
And yet, no president has done that. Nor has the Senate passed a bill that would decriminalize or legalize marijuana. It raises the question: Is there an issue in which the top of the elected class is more out of step with the public? Right after the election this year, Gallup found 68 percent of respondents supported legalization. It was half that at the turn of the millennium.
Democrats, at least, seemed keen on getting on the popular side of that movement. In 2016, the party put a pathway for legalizing pot in its platform. Four years later, nearly all the candidates ran on legalization too.
But Biden didn’t. And, as my colleagues Natalie Fertig and Mona Zhang pointed out recently, his nomination slowed the party’s movement toward legal cannabis. The Democratic platform in 2020 called for decriminalization and legalized medical marijuana use but left legalization up to the states.
Those who put the platform together have stressed that easing the legal punishments for weed use was no small deal. But pushing decriminalization over legalization also seems similar to how Democrats embraced civil unions in the early aughts as a way to duck actually coming out in favor of gay marriage. Eventually, everyone was just waiting for Barack Obama to do it.
But before he could, one Joe Biden beat him to the punch. Will Biden make a similar calculation with marijuana legalization? I asked Rep. Ro Khanna, a lead sponsor of the Marijuana Justice Act — which legalizes weed — when he thought each party’s general election candidate would run on a legalization platform.
For Democrats, he predicted 2024. For Republicans, he said 2028.
Told that would mean either Biden endorsed legalization or someone else was running on the Democratic ticket, he responded: “That’s my guess on timeframe!”
Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news and tips at [email protected] and [email protected] or on Twitter at @samstein and @renurayasam.
First In Nightly
SCREEN TEST — The Biden administration is trying to transform the United States’ Covid-19 testing system — shifting focus from diagnosing people who suspect they’re infected to regularly screening millions of Americans at school or work, David Lim writes.
The White House announced last week that it would spend $10 billion on screening programs for K-12 students as part of a broader national effort to return kids to classrooms. The administration has also inked deals with several manufacturers of rapid tests designed for at-home use. The moves come as demand for testing is dropping nationwide, and both lawmakers and the public are focused on the vaccine rollout.
The success of the shift to widespread screening will help determine how quickly — and safely — schools and many businesses can reopen. With cases still high nationwide, more contagious variants spreading and only 14 percent of Americans fully vaccinated, public health experts say that testing is still crucial to tamp down the virus’s spread. It will take months to vaccinate most adults and complete studies of whether Covid-19 vaccines are safe and effective for children.
“We need this surveillance strategy that is going to take us through the pandemic and go to post-pandemic, so we need to be thinking big and broad and further than just what’s going on right now,” said Scott Becker, CEO of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “Through this pandemic we in the public health system and the country have been focusing on what’s in front of our nose and we really need to look further out.”
AROUND THE WORLD
WHEN THE SHIP HITS LAND — Morning Trade co-author Gavin Bade emails Nightly:
Shipping services group GAC said today the Ever Given, a 400-meter ship that became stuck in the Suez Canal at around 2:40 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, had been “partially refloated” and moved to the side of the canal, potentially allowing some traffic to resume. But according to the live ship tracker VesselFinder, the ship was still lodged in the canal last we checked, despite efforts of multiple tugboats and earth excavators to get it free.
The grounding has major implications for a shipping industry already stretched thin from a global semiconductor shortage and an increase in demand for consumer goods in rich nations during the coronavirus pandemic. About one-tenth of world trade is routed through the canal, including ships like Ever Given that bring manufactured goods from East Asia to markets in Europe.
For U.S. consumers, the most immediate impact was in commodities. The canal is also a major route for global oil and natural gas shipments, and prices for both of those commodities spiked today because of concerns of a short-term supply crunch, Natural Gas Intelligence reported. All told, more than 100 ships are waiting to get through the canal, the Wall Street Journal said this afternoon, including more than a dozen liquid natural gas ships.
Crossing the canal costs €250,000 for containerships, according to Spiegel Online, but many companies prefer to save time and fuel compared to the alternative route from Asia to Europe, via the Horn of Africa.
Ever Given is one of a new class of giant container ships made to maximize economies of scale for shippers. If it cannot be dislodged while still weighed down with goods, Bloomberg says salvage crews may need to remove its ballast water, fuel or even some of its containers to help break it free.
What'd I Miss?
— Biden puts Harris in front on immigration: Vice President Kamala Harris will be the White House’s point person on immigration issues at the nation’s southern border, Biden announced today, tasking her with stemming the tide of migrants, many of them unaccompanied children, arriving in the U.S.
— FDA authorizes J&J partner to help with vaccine production: Catalent, a “fill-finish” facility that bottles vaccines, revealed in a tweet that the FDA had authorized its Bloomington, Ind., factory to begin shipping out shots. The company started sending out vaccines immediately after receiving permission from FDA, said one person familiar with the situation.
— Senators salvage Pentagon policy nominee in tie vote: Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee split evenly on whether to advance Colin Kahl, the nominee for the Pentagon’s top policy job, leaving him a rocky path for confirmation in the wider Senate. The panel split in a 13-13 vote that broke entirely along party lines, according to a Senate Republican aide. A party-line tie was considered the best outcome for Kahl, as GOP resistance to his nomination solidified over his past partisan tweets and differences over Middle East policy.
— Trump vaccine chief Slaoui fired from pharma board over sexual harassment allegations: GlaxoSmithKline announced that Moncef Slaoui, who led the Trump administration’s coronavirus vaccine accelerator, was terminated from the board of directors of Galvani Bioelectronics, a GSK joint venture. The company received a letter in February detailing sexual harassment and inappropriate conduct allegations against Slaoui that date back several years, to when he led GSK’s vaccine division, CEO Emma Walmsley said in an internal memo to staff. GSK enlisted an outside law firm to look into the accusations.
— Senate confirms Levine: The Senate voted 52-48 today to confirm Rachel Levine to serve as assistant secretary of health. Levine, a pediatrician by training who led Pennsylvania’s health department through most of the Covid-19 outbreak, is the first openly transgender official confirmed by the Senate, reports Alice Miranda Ollstein. Just two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, joined all Democrats in supporting Levine.
Ask The Audience
Nightly asks you: Have you gotten vaccinated? Or are you struggling to sign up on your state’s website? Are you still ineligible? Tell us your vaccine story on our form, and we’ll include select responses in Friday’s edition.
Around the Nation
HOW TO AVOID A REPEAT — In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, Obama tapped then-Vice President Biden to help push through gun reforms, but they ended up going nowhere in the Senate. Now, in the aftermath of two mass shootings in less than a week, Anita Kumar reports that Biden’s hoping to avoid a repeat — and activists are wondering why he isn’t doing more. Listen to the latest edition of POLITICO Dispatch for more.
Nightly Number
Parting Image
WHERE WE GET JABBED — A concert venue. A school bus. An aircraft carrier.
These are some of the not-so-typical places where more than 100 million Americans have gotten their Covid-19 vaccine administered. Along with the doctors’ offices, hospitals and pharmacies where people are rolling up their sleeves, health care officials are getting creative about meeting demand for the crucial shots.
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