You Can’t Have Your DOJ and Eat It Too

In an interview, the President defended his administration’s crackdown on medical marijuana:

“I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, ‘Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.’ What I can say is, ‘Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage.’ As a consequence, there haven’t been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes.”

But isn’t this basically what he did with DOMA, when he instructed the DOJ not to defend it (a decision I support, if a bit uneasily)? The circumstances are a bit different to be sure, but I don’t think this really jives with his earlier statements the way he wants us to think it does. You can’t have it both ways.

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