The looming threat of a Republican-led U.S. has sparked a movement among U.S. Senators from both sides of the aisle. Pro-pot federal lawmakers are currently pushing to get two pieces of cannabis banking legislation passed before year-end: the SAFE act and the HOPE act.

Don’t be fooled—this legislation isn’t providing safety or hope to anyone.

A bipartisan coalition, which includes U.S. Senate Banking Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-OH), U.S. Senators Steve Daines (R-MT) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) met with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) last week to discuss passing the SAFE Banking Act (S. 910) during the lame-duck session. The SAFE Act, which would make it easier for cannabis businesses to take out business loans and open bank accounts, has already bounced around in the house a good bit, but has stagnated in the U.S. Senate, unable to satisfy either conservatives or progressives.

The bill, however, may pick up steam, and seems likely to pass. Progressives have opposed the bill, calling the bill hypocritical: they are unwilling to support a bill that would benefit weed businesses while many people are still imprisoned for marijuana-related offenses. Apparently this blatant moral posturing has been compelling, as some Republicans have voiced their support of a companion bill, the HOPE Act.

The HOPE Act (H.R. 6129), introduced by U.S. Representatives David Joyce (R-OH) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), is an expungement bill. The bill offers federal grants to states to offset the administrative and financial burden of expunging cannabis offenses from criminals’ records. These bills come on the heels of a bill proposing the expansion of medical marijuana research, passed in the Senate by unanimous consent just last Wednesday.

It remains to be seen whether the HOPE Act is still a bridge too far for many Republicans (or their constituencies, at least). The SAFE Act does, however, appear to have significant Republican support, though many Democrats are opposed to it, believing that the bill doesn’t go far enough.

We’re all accustomed to this sort of thing from progressive legislators. Their only guiding principle seems to be the introduction of vice into society—weed bills like the SAFE Act and the HOPE Act are what we’ve come to expect from left-wing “Progressives.” However, we really ought to start questioning what the so-called conservatives representing us are really conserving. Since when is it a conservative value to promote business loans to cannabis shops? Since when is it a conservative value to undermine justice by expunging criminal records willy-nilly? And appeals to the virtues of free-market economics aren’t helpful here. Free markets in the promotion of public vice are hardly commendable.

H.L. Mencken said somewhere that electing upstanding citizens to government office is like staffing the brothels with virgins. This plays out before our very eyes time and again: our “conservatives” are elected on the basis of promises to promote family values, fight for law and order, and defend Constitutional rights. And time and again they inevitably are caught up in the promotion of legislation and causes fundamentally opposed to their pretended conservatism.

Of course, this is nothing new—politicians have been disappointing their constituents for as long as there have been governments. God even tells us that it is the nature of political officers to disappoint their people (1 Sam. 8:10-22). Fine, and c’est la vie. But let’s stop pretending that the “conservatives” in our government are actually conserving anything valuable. They’re just as caught up in the game as the progressives and are more than happy to promote vice as long as they think it will get them reelected.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to let your federal lawmakers that you do not want to help the drug cartels with their marijuana sales and businesses. As for the HOPE act, there is a process for expunging federal criminal records which should include the entire criminal record and history. As we know from a Cook County prosecutor, it takes criminal persistence to wind up in prison for violating marijuana laws, saying it “almost always takes at least five arrests for cannabis violations before jail or prison time is considered.

Written by Walter E. Williams

Democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seeking to represent New York’s 14th Congressional District, has called for the abolition of the Electoral College. Her argument came on the heels of the Senate’s confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court. She was lamenting the fact that Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, nominated by George W. Bush, and Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, nominated by Donald Trump, were court appointments made by presidents who lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College vote.

Hillary Clinton has long been a critic of the Electoral College. Just recently, she wrote in The Atlantic, “You won’t be surprised to hear that I passionately believe it’s time to abolish the Electoral College.”

Subjecting presidential elections to the popular vote sounds eminently fair to Americans who have been miseducated by public schools and universities. Worse yet, the call to eliminate the Electoral College reflects an underlying contempt for our Constitution and its protections for personal liberty. Regarding miseducation, the founder of the Russian Communist Party, Vladimir Lenin, said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” His immediate successor, Josef Stalin, added, “Education is a weapon whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

A large part of Americans’ miseducation is the often heard claim that we are a democracy. The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the two most fundamental documents of our nation — the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In fact, our Constitution — in Article 4, Section 4 — guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” The Founding Fathers had utter contempt for democracy. James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 10, said that in a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.”

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Virginia Gov. Edmund Randolph said that “in tracing these evils to their origin, every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams wrote: “Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.” At the Constitutional Convention, Alexander Hamilton said: “We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty” is found not in “the extremes of democracy but in moderate governments. … If we incline too much to democracy, we shall soon shoot into a monarchy.”

For those too dense to understand these arguments, ask yourselves: Does the Pledge of Allegiance say “to the democracy for which it stands” or “to the republic for which it stands”? Did Julia Ward Howe make a mistake in titling her Civil War song “Battle Hymn of the Republic”? Should she have titled it “Battle Hymn of the Democracy”?

The Founders saw our nation as being composed of sovereign states that voluntarily sought to join a union under the condition that each state admitted would be coequal with every other state. The Electoral College method of choosing the president and vice president guarantees that each state, whether large or small in area or population, has some voice in selecting the nation’s leaders. Were we to choose the president and vice president under a popular vote, the outcome of presidential races would always be decided by a few highly populated states. They would be states such as California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania, which contain 134.3 million people, or 41 percent of our population. Presidential candidates could safely ignore the interests of the citizens of Wyoming, Alaska, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana and Delaware. Why? They have only 5.58 million Americans, or 1.7 percent of the U.S. population. We would no longer be a government “of the people”; instead, our government would be put in power by and accountable to the leaders and citizens of a few highly populated states.

Political satirist H.L. Mencken said, “The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

This article was originally published at  the Creators Syndicate webpage.