9th Circuit Court of Appeals Rebukes DOJ on Medical Marijuana
In what is a victory for the Separation of Powers — and a defeat for the Obama Administration — the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled that the Department of Justice cannot prosecute medical marijuana patients and providers, as long as those individuals are complying with State law. The court’s opinion was written by Reagan-appointee Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain.
At issue in the case was a bipartisan Congressional appropriations rider (passed in 2015, and renewed in 2016) that barred the Department of Justice from spending money in any fashion that might inhibit States from implementing their own laws as to the legalization of medical marijuana.
The Department of Justice, however — with the support of President Obama — has continued to prosecute individual growers, users, and sellers of medical marijuana, arguing that such prosecutions do not violate the rider because they do not inhibit the overall implementation of State laws. The Department of Justice’s interpretation had troubling separation-of-powers implications, which the court was quick to address.
The court recognized that the Congress has the explicit Constitutional authority to appropriate funds and that this authority was a critical constraint on the authority of the Executive Branch of Government (of which the Department of Justice is a part). Citing Justice Story, the court noted that without this constraint the Executive Branch would be able to access the public purse however it wished — which was clearly not the intention of the Framers.
Having recognized the separation-of-powers issue, the court turned to whether or not the Department of Justice had violated the Congressional rider. This, of course, was an easy decision; the Department of Justice had clearly gone against the will of the Congress. The court affirmed that the DOJ had “prevented the state from giving practical effect to its law,” which was clearly what the Congressional rider was intended to prevent.
The decision is a sound one, and it is a victory for the Constitutional principle of the separation of powers. It is also a clear rebuke to the Obama Administration, which had consistently maintained that the Department of Justice was correctly interpreting the statute. In a broader sense, it is a rebuke of an Administration that has long run roughshod over the separation of powers, Federalism, and the constraints of the executive branch. Given the Obama Administration’s long history of irreverence towards the Constitutional generally and the separation of powers specifically, it was not the least bit shocking that it found itself on the wrong side of the law. But at least as to this one issue, the Constitution prevailed over the President- which is precisely how it should be.
