Many Democrats have already taken steps to provide relief to people with convictions, while Republicans dismiss the move as a political ploy.
When President Joe Biden announced plans last week to pardon thousands of people with low-level federal marijuana convictions, he implored the nation’s governors to follow his lead.
Don’t expect him to get many takers.
Republican governors have little reason to heed his call and be seen as advancing the agenda of an unpopular Democratic president when GOP messaging has focused on runaway inflation and soaring crime rates in the final stretch before Election Day.
“I don’t think that it’s going to rise to a high enough level of concern in the short term, and probably not even in the longer term,” said Gregg Peppin, a veteran Republican political strategist in Minnesota who has worked on multiple gubernatorial campaigns. “The battle lines have been hardened as it relates to the issues of this election. … Republicans are campaigning on economic issues and public safety.”
But Democrats are unlikely to take significant steps in response to Biden’s directive for very different reasons.
The governors most sympathetic to the president’s goal of pardoning those with nonviolent marijuana offenses are way ahead of him, having wiped records or set up systems for people to get their convictions expunged as state lawmakers legalized weed. [Read More @ Politico]
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