By Monterey Bud

 

The chair of the House Rules Committee, Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions, may face an uphill re-election battle this November in his bid to retain his influential position, partly because of one cannabis reform activist and his new super PAC.

Rob Kampia, a co-founder and former executive director of the Marijuana Policy Project, is spearheading an effort to unseat Sessions. As chair of the Rules Committee, Sessions has systematically blocked bipartisan legislation intended to provide safe harbor for medical cannabis states, their businesses, and patients who use cannabis medicinally.

“[Sessions] is in fact what I call a sphincter who is constipating the process,” Kampia told the Washington Examiner.

The super PAC, Texans Removing Outdated and Unresponsive Politicians, was initially started by Kampia after he left the Marijuana Policy Project in 2017. The new super PAC hopes to raise roughly a half-million dollars in support of candidates representing the Democratic and Libertarian parties.

“I am going to bundle a whole bunch of checks and send them to the Democrat without talking to the Democrat. You are going to see a bunch of $2,700 checks flowing from the same people who you’re going to see on our [super PAC]reports,” Kampia told reporters.

While recent polls have continually demonstrated that Americans and their elected officials support legalization, as chair of the Rules Committee, Rep. Sessions has repeatedly blocked all less-restrictive cannabis legislation from advancing for the past two years.

In support of a fellow libertarian, Kampia has backed the Texas Libertarian Party’s Treasurer, Melina Baker, for representative in Sessions’ 32nd District, covering the Dallas area.

Kampia “plans to target only a small part of the electorate, particularly students at the University of Texas at Dallas and libertarian-leaning Republicans,” according to the Washington Examiner.

After noting that Sessions had “an easy name to hate,” Kampia guesstimated that medical cannabis would already be legalized if not for Sessions. Pete Sessions is not related to US Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an ardent marijuana opponent, but his father was former FBI director William Sessions. Until James Comey last year, Sessions was the only FBI head to be fired by a president. William Sessions served under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush from 1987 until 1993, when President Bill Clinton fired him in the wake of a report alleging that Sessions had improperly used government aircraft and spent government money for personal use, as reported in the Dallas Morning News.

Kampia and his new super PAC hope to elect a representative that will put aside his or her personal beliefs and cast their vote based on the will of their constituents and scientific evidence.