When it comes to overhauling pot policy in the U.S. Senate, the young pols are running headfirst into the old guard.

A high-wattage trio of junior senators — Democrats Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand plus GOP presidential contender Rand Paul — is mounting an ambitious effort to have the federal government bless the use of marijuana in the 24 jurisdictions (23 states and the District of Columbia) that have voted to legalize the drug for medical purposes. Their legislation would also allow banks to handle transactions involving marijuana and force the federal government to recognize that marijuana has a medical use, rather than lumping it in with heroin and LSD.


The bill comes at a moment of swift change in public opinion about marijuana laws and movement in many states to legalize the drug for medicinal and, in some cases, recreational purposes.

But the Senate Judiciary Committee is emerging as a serious buzz kill for the pro-reform set.

The powerful panel is stacked with some of the most senior lawmakers in Congress, many of whom came to power during a tough-on-crime era of the drug wars that saw stiffer penalties for drug possession. Several of them openly gripe about what they call the Obama administration’s lack of enforcement of existing federal drug laws — and they certainly aren’t willing to send a signal that Congress is OK with the movement to liberalize pot.

“I’m probably against it,” Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the most senior Senate Republican and a member of the Judiciary Committee, said of the cannabis bill.

“I don’t think we need to go there,” added Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Senate Republican and former Texas attorney general and state Supreme Court justice. “This is a more dangerous topic than what a lot of the advocates acknowledge.”

Republicans most recently made news on the marijuana front in December, adding language to a spending bill that effectively blocked sales of pot in the District of Columbia — where, a month earlier, voters overwhelmingly approved a legalization measure.

But all was not lost for reform advocates. Tucked into that same bill was a provision barring the Justice Department from spending money on raiding medical marijuana facilities. It was a signal that Booker, Gillibrand and Paul might break through — eventually.

“The Senate is going to move. This to me is one of those catalytic points in our country,” Booker said in an interview. “We’re going to win. It’s not a question of if, the question is when.”

But barring a floor vote on an amendment to another bill, it may take significant turnover atop the Senate for the advance that Booker and his drug-reform cohorts are seeking. Not a single Republican on the Judiciary Committee has co-sponsored the medical marijuana legislation, and senior members of the committee are not eager to take it up.

Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said in an interview he hadn’t read the bill and that it would be months before it comes for a hearing — if ever.

Still, there is evidence in the committee’s membership of a generational change in the Republican Party that could portend where drug laws are headed.

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) panned GOP leaders’ opposition to the District’s new drug laws and has voted repeatedly in the past for the Hinchey Amendment, which prohibits the Justice Department from going after states’ medical marijuana programs. And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who launched his presidential campaign on Monday, has expressed support for letting states manage their own drug laws — though he admitted in a brief interview he hadn’t read Paul’s bill. Cruz and Flake were elected to the Senate in 2012 and serve on the Judiciary Committee.

Still, the GOP is rooted in parts of the country where decriminalization and medical marijuana have lagged behind other regions. Grassley’s home state of Iowa hasn’t legalized medical marijuana, nor has Cornyn’s Texas — or much of the South, for that matter.

“I’m really uneasy about any kind of signal that might increase” drug use, said Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a former state attorney general who during an interview boasted of his longtime efforts to discourage marijuana use. “I’m not sure it … has any medical justification whatsoever.”

That’s where Gillibrand hopes to step in. The New York Democrat last year persuaded dozens of fellow senators from both parties to back her bill to reform how sexual assaults in the military are investigated — and she’s looking to pull off a similar feat on the marijuana measure.

Though their bill reclassifies the drug and rewrites banking laws to allow medical pot transactions, Gillibrand, Booker and Paul believe the winning path forward is rooted in the science of the drug. There’s little advantage to presenting the bill to reluctant lawmakers as a federal liberalization of drug policy. But there is potential upside in describing to undecided or resistant senators how injured or sick people have benefited from medical marijuana in the two dozen jurisdictions that permit its use.

“Sick people, frankly, are willing to go visit with folks to let them know: ‘This is the only thing that’s been helping me with PTSD, it’s the only thing that’s helping my child with tragic seizures that undermine their brain development, it’s the only thing helping me with chronic nausea,’” Booker said. “We’re going to get it done because of the incontrovertible science.”

The emotional connection between those who benefit from medical marijuana and senators on the fence could be powerful. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who had long opposed medical use of pot, was converted after learning that a child with kidney failure could recover his or her appetite after using marijuana.

“It’s really an issue of understanding the medical uses and the diseases that it actually treats,” Gillibrand said. “If you meet any of these patients, particularly the young kids who are suffering from 100 seizures a day, you want to give them whatever medicine their doctor prescribes.”

It’s not clear where the party leaders will end up in the debate. Aides would not say whether Reid will support the Senate’s first medical marijuana bill. An aide to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declined to comment.

Still, Booker said a number of other senators have been open-minded or even eager to engage.

Paul is also expected to press the issue on the presidential campaign trail and in the Capitol. At a news conference on Capitol Hill earlier this month, the likely White House hopeful introduced his political director’s father-in-law, who suffers from multiple sclerosis and uses medical marijuana to treat his condition.

“If one of these patients up here takes marijuana in the states where it’s illegal, they will go to jail,” Paul said, standing alongside Gillibrand and Booker and several medical marijuana users this month. “Ask people that question: ‘Are you in favor of that?’ I think you’ll find that, overwhelmingly, people are not in favor of that.”

But members like Sessions, Hatch and Cornyn show no signs of budging, presenting a daunting hurdle in the Senate given the difficulty of passing any bill with a whiff of controversy.

“They’re far behind the public on this issue,” said Dan Riffle of the Marijuana Policy Project, conceding the makeup of the Senate will have to change before much headway is made. “I do think some people need to leave the voting rolls, so to speak.”