Marijuana Banking Sponsor Lays Out Plan To Advance Reform After Exclusion From Defense Bill, Sharply Rebuking Senate Blockade
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The House sponsor of marijuana banking legislation said on Wednesday that following its lack of inclusion in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) he will be immediately getting to work to attach the reform to pending omnibus appropriations legislation—though he added that he’s lost sleep over recent setbacks and has “unrepeatable” things to say about the Senate over their inability to advance the bill. Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) made the remarks at a House Rules Committee meeting on Wednesday, where members took up the large-scale defense bill, which advocates and supportive lawmakers hoped would be used as the vehicle to advance the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act but which ultimately omitted any cannabis language when it was posted on Tuesday. Meanwhile, a key committee chairman said at the meeting that the Senate is just one vote shy of passing marijuana banking reform, though he also signaled that the next step is to pursue it through appropriations legislation. It seems apparent that a key factor keeping the measure out of the NDAA was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who talked about opposing the effort to include SAFE Banking in the defense bill on Tuesday. Emotions are charged over the banking reform issue on Capitol Hill. The bill could still advance this year, but the path forward is unclear, and hopes were high that NDAA would be the vehicle to finally get it done. “One piece that I really wanted to add to this was the piece that [Perlmutter] has championed, which is the SAFE Banking Act, which I think is a crucially important piece of legislation,” House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-WA) said at the Rules hearing on Wednesday.

Under the status quo of federal prohibition, the system is currently a “mishmash hodgepodge” in…

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Source : Marijuana Banking Sponsor Lays Out Plan To Advance Reform After Exclusion From Defense Bill, Sharply Rebuking Senate Blockade

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