On Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned an Obama-era policy that allowed numerous states that legalized the sale and consumption of marijuana to operate freely without fear of the federal government cracking down on their activities. The decision was met with visceral scorn from elected leaders from such states on both sides of the political aisle as well as many commentators who view this policy as a regression to an older-yet-failed conception of drug policy in the United States.
In response to this development, my good friend and colleague Josh Hammer wrote a well-reasoned defense of Sessions’ unpopular decision. Josh correctly pointed out that Sessions upheld the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution (See U.S. Const. art. VI.) in the face of an outright abuse of prosecutorial discretion (which I described in my piece yesterday about DACA) to reaffirm the importance of maintaining both the rule of law and the principle of federal law remaining superior to individual state law. He wrote the following:
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