Eric Holder’s selective enforcement of the law has law enforcement up in arms.
Sheriffs, narcotics officers and police chiefs issued an open letter to the attorney general on Friday, saying his decision to let some states go unchallenged in legalizing marijuana use for adults has put the foot soldiers in the nation’s drug wars in a bind.
Holder announced Thursday that the Justice Department would not challenge Washington and Colorado referendums allowing adult recreational use of marijuana, focusing instead on controlling use by minors, distribution by gangs, cultivation on public lands, smuggling into states where it’s still illegal and possession on federal property.
Great. And the Department of Justice frowns on white slavery and child pornography, too. The problem is, if marijuana operations that sell to adults also happen to use isolated, federally owned lands to grow it then hire stoned gang members to drive it across state lines to sell to kids in school yards, they very rarely put it on their business cards.
Or, as the law agencies write, “these will be extremely difficult for federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies to enforce in practice given the recently approved referendums.”
“As law enforcement officials, we are charged with enforcing the law and keeping our neighborhoods and communities safe — a task that becomes infinitely harder for our front-line men and women given the Department’s position,” the letter states.
This kind of cherry-picking is all of a piece with the Obama administration’s dangerously imperial habit of making itself the arbiters of which laws actually merit enforcement depending on the political base it’s trying to placate.
Liberal Democrat bastions like Washington state and the newly Democrat Colorado get to make laws Holder and his Democrat administration won’t challenge, despite their clear contradiction of federal law. The Justice Department, meanwhile, goes to war with Texas over voting laws and redistricting lines – subjects the Constitution and Supreme Court have said are clearly matters for states to decide.
And the enforcement of immigration laws – like granting “deferred action status” to the children of illegal immigrants (which led to a legal challenge by Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agents) or the recently announced policy to order ICE agents to avoid detaining illegal immigrants who happen to have children – is basically decided by fiat from the White House to pander to Hispanic political activists.
The police chiefs’ letter was about marijuana, but the fact it was written at all is just another symptom of the confusion bred by the Obama administration’s essential lawlessness, whether it’s immigration, fluctuating Obamacare deadlines, or, now, drug laws.
It’s selective enforcement of the law not even law enforcers understand.
HT: Huffington Post
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