By Tom Angell
A Republican U.S. senator is launching a partisan attack against efforts by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) to let marijuana businesses access banks.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) took to Twitter Monday night to share an article about a push from Warren and other senators to encourage federal regulators to loosen restrictions on banks that want to provide financial services to the cannabis industry, and he couldn’t resist slinging a little partisan mud.
“No wonders Ds are losing,” he tweeted, referring to Democrats.
There are a few problems with Cornyn’s line of thinking.
First, another Republican senator also signed the same marijuana banking letter that Warren and other lawmakers sent to federal banking regulators last month.
In addition to adding her name to the note about financial services for cannabis businesses, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) has separately taken a leadership role in the push to allow people who use marijuana legally in accordance with state policies to purchase guns, something that’s currently against federal law. To date, Cornyn hasn’t weighed in on that issue.
The other problem is that polling now consistently shows that legalizing marijuana earns far more voter support than either Republicans or Democrats in Congress do. Thus, the notion that Warren’s work on banking access for cannabis businesses is the reason that Hillary Clinton lost the White House or that her party failed to take control of the House or Senate in the most recent election doesn’t seem to comport with political reality.
A top aide to Republican Sen. Rand Paul (KY) pointed out as much, tweeting to Cornyn that Democrats aren’t losing elections because of marijuana but that the “GOP might if more don’t get into [the]21st century.”
Medical marijuana patient and former talk show host Montel Williams even chimed in, calling himself “hardly a Warren fan” and offering to help educate Cornyn on cannabis policy.
Marijuana business leaders and legalization advocates have long pointed out that current federal rules discouraging banks from working with the cannabis industry create public safety harms by forcing them to do business in cash, which makes them a target for robberies.
In their December letter to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Warren, Murkowski and eight other senators ask the federal government to issue new guidance making it clear that marijuana providers and other businesses that serve the cannabis industry should be able to access financial services.
“Forcing all these direct and indirect businesses to operate in cash not only creates a huge target for criminals, but also complicates the collection of state and federal taxes,” the senators wrote. “This business environment is an invitation to tax fraud, robberies, money laundering and organized crime.”
In 2014, the Obama administration released guidance intended to make it easier for banks to do business with cannabis sellers, but many financial industry leaders remain wary. They say that until federal law actually changes — as opposed to relying on nonbinding memos that could be changed by future administrations — they’re going to stay away.
There were a number of standalone bills and amendments concerning marijuana banking introduced and voted on in the just-concluded 114th Congress, but nothing made it to the president’s desk to be enacted into law. It is expected that supportive lawmakers will renew their push in the 115th Congress that begins on Tuesday.
