I live near DC, and I tend to think of a lot of their local issues as my local issues. This works out pretty well for me, as they have some pretty exotic local issues -- the one they had today, for instance, had the potential to turn into a legit Constitutional crisis. It had conservatism versus liberalism, the ruling class versus the working class, some old white men versus a young black woman, and a bunch of people smoking pot. That's a pretty fun news day, in my book.
It all stems, of course, from one of the great social debates of our time at the beginning of the 21st century, which can be further generalized to one of the great social pursuits of all of human history -- namely, people would like to get chemically blitzed out of their minds, and governments tend to be wet blankets. At this point in history, alcohol and cigarettes are generally legal, whereas marijuana is generally not. In DC, there was a public referendum, and local law was passed saying that marijuana would be decriminalized.
Congress is, according to the Constitution, supposed to govern the District of Columbia, and sometimes they even do. More often, they defer to a set of rules in place establishing Home Rule, meaning that DC is allowed to govern itself as long as Congress doesn't notice and overrule them. In the case of a referendum like this, Congress has sixty days to quash the rule before it takes effect. The sixty-first day for the pot referendum was, as it happens, today.
Yesterday made it exciting -- a few Republican congresspersons wrote some threatening letters to Mayor Bowser, and maybe I was the only one who noticed that it was a few old white men that were threatening to throw 42-year-old black woman in jail if she didn't do what her masters told her, but even if the national press didn't report it that way, I'd be surprised if her constituents didn't see a racial component. I heard a guy on the radio (Marc Fisher, a local columnist for the Washington Post) say that this was our first chance to see if Muriel Bowser had a backbone. She's fairly newly-elected; maybe this was her first real test.
At any rate, she didn't back down. She and her staff set manageable rules and published a simple, memorable motto for the District's potheads: "Home grow, home use."
The third portion of the motto, the unwritten portion, seems like it's the loudest today: "Home rule." DC leans hard left, of course, a very liberal, very minority-heavy demographic, and it isn't a comfortable place for the conservative-majority Congress to throw its weight around. Today, they enforced local laws for the locals, defying their effective absentee landlords. Hard to think of anything more American than that.
Chalk up a victory for the little guys, for the local guys. And don't smoke pot, kids; it's more addictive than you think, and it's not great for your cardio system, your lungs, or your social life. If you're going to do it, bake cookies and share with your friends.
Actually, even if you're not going to do it -- baking cookies and sharing with your friends would be pretty cool this weekend, wouldn't it?
