What an interesting battle Colorado’s junior senator — Republican Cory Gardner — has launched against fellow law-and-order conservative Jeff Sessions. For weeks now Gardner has blocked Senate confirmation of Justice Department nominees to try to knock some sense into the attorney general for threatening states like ours that have legalized recreational use of marijuana.

We applaud Gardner’s efforts, though with some caveats, and hope he prevails. The Obama administration should have done more to protect states when it had the chance, but the Cole-memo direction to respect states’ rights on legal cannabis was working fine. Sessions was wrong to rescind it.

The attorney general started this wrongheaded fight despite assurances he gave Gardner and other senators that he would leave pot-friendly states be. After all, the immigration hardliner said, while lobbying for his own Senate confirmation, that he expected to be too busy running President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration.

It’s worth repeating that Sessions loathes pot, once joked that he thought the Ku Klux Klan was OK until he found out some of its members enjoyed the drug, and believes that those who use it aren’t good people.

Yet we know that the overwhelming number of players in Colorado’s billion-dollar industry are good folks doing their best to keep things safe, legal and respectable. Coloradans voted to legalize and would do so again. Meanwhile, eight other states and the District of Columbia have now legalized as well. Many, many more allow legal medical use, and a 2014 Congressional amendment prevents federal funds from being spent to interfere in those jurisdictions.

Gardner — who didn’t support legalization back in 2012 — has so far exercised his privilege as a senator to keep 11 nominees from getting a floor vote. As The Denver Post’s Washington correspondent Mark K. Matthews reports, more than 20 other candidates for U.S. marshal and U.S. attorney positions are moving toward the confirmation process, including former Douglas County Sheriff David Weaver, tapped to become our state’s next U.S. marshal, and we’re waiting for a U.S. attorney appointment also. Clearly, Gardner’s got leverage and he should keep on using it until Sessions backs down.

We understand the concerns of critics who see Gardner’s actions as obstructionism. Typically we frown upon use of procedural workarounds that hold the normal functioning of government hostage to unique demands. And we’d like to see our judicial system’s enforcers properly staffed.

But clever protest is baked into our democratic system for a reason, and clearly there are times when throwing sand in the gears is the right call.

Here Gardner is not just protecting his home state, but many others. He is standing up for states’ rights provided by the 10th Amendment in seeking to hold the Trump administration to its promises. Trump himself told Coloradans he would respect the wishes of states that have legalized.

Sessions deserves the blame in this dispute. He is the one looking past the will of millions of voters and the findings of many polls that show most Americans don’t mind the spread of legal pot.

Yes, we would rather see Congress settle the matter with legislation. But these days Congress can barely pass a budget.

Like Gardner, we didn’t support legalization in 2012. We argued that while we believed the federal war on drugs was a failure, we thought a Colorado-only protest vote wasn’t wise. Yet it worked out.

We hope Gardner’s unusual protest in this battle does as well.

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