Minnesota Governor Vows to Legalize Marijuana: “I Trust Adults to Make Their Own Decisions”

The center of Democratic efficacy is not in New York or California—it’s in the Midwest. Minnesota has spent its entire legislative session notching progressive win after win, from becoming the first state to codify abortion rights after the fall of Roe, to guaranteeing free meals for every Minnesota public and charter school student.

And now, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is vowing to sign the marijuana legalization bill passed by the state legislature.

“I served on the Veterans Affairs Committee in Congress for a dozen years, and we passed the first piece of legislation on medicinal cannabis to help us move away from the opioid addictions that we saw with our returning soldiers. And we know that prohibition doesn’t work,” Walz reasoned on Sunday. “And with the issues of contamination of fentanyl, and xylazine and things we’re seeing show up on street cannabis, it doesn’t make any sense. And so we’re gonna allow people to grow it at home.”

Walz’s answer was steeped not just in practical logic, but in convincing philosophical terms that embody what a winning case for the party is: emphasizing freedom to, and not just freedom from.

“I trust adults to make their own decisions. We’re talking about freedoms. You make [your] own health care decisions in Minnesota. We’re not going to tell you how to deal with your children. We’re going to allow teachers to teach. We’re not going to ban books,” Walz said. “We’ll have it legally—the regime will be in place to make sure that it’s safe, the things that are being sold to folks, and we’ll use the resources from the tax revenue to help educate people on addiction which we know is ravaging, you know, people across the country.”

States like Florida and Texas have earned much-deserved scrutiny for their extremely oppressive legislative sessions. Minnesota and other midwestern states warrant their own contrasting recognition: of Democrats running on popular progressive policies, delivering on them, and bettering the lives of millions.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has gone out of her way to attack drag queens, is now defending her drag-wearing boyfriend.

Greene has been dating Brian Glenn since late last year. Glenn currently works as a programming director for the conservative Right Side Broadcasting Network, but from 2013 to 2015, he was an anchor for a local Dallas, Texas, news station. A video posted to Twitter on Sunday shows him in drag for a morning segment. It is unclear when the segment originally aired.

“I’m kicking the shoes off,” Glenn says in the clip, sporting a curly blonde wig, a pink dress, gloves, and a purse.

“I may keep the pantyhose on. It does feel kind of good, actually,” he adds, which is blatantly untrue (just ask anyone who’s had to wear pantyhose for an extended period of time).

Both Glenn and Greene have shared the video on social media, with Greene tweeting that she was “literally lol’ing.”

Glenn “dressed in drag for morning news in Dallas years ago reporting on an upcoming local theatre production and the morons over at Patriot Takes think this is an attack,” she said on Twitter. “The left is so stupid.”

Greene has repeatedly attacked drag performances of any kind, at one point calling them “indoctrination” and saying it should be “illegal” for children to attend. She has likened supporting the LGBTQ community to grooming children, and even suggested that people who support drag queens should be considered “domestic terrorists.” She and other far-right people seeking to ban drag in public insist that their efforts are to protect children.

Well, her boyfriend’s news segment presumably did not include a warning for any minors who might be watching, so people under the age of 18 were likely able to see such obscene content.

The actual problem for Republicans does not seem to be drag, but who is dressed in drag. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee wore drag in high school, but he signed the country’s first law banning drag performances in public (that law was blocked by a judge). Criminally indicted Representative George Santos dressed in drag in Brazil, but he has fully embraced the GOP’s anti-LGBTQ stances. And now Glenn, who works for a far-right, openly Trump-supporting news network.

The issue actually at play is LGBTQ people who live their lives openly and do not fall in line with whatever Republicans deem acceptable.

The Nebraska state legislature passed a bill Friday banning abortion after 12 weeks and gender-affirming care for minors, a double-whammy of curbing human rights.

The anti-abortion, anti-trans bill passed the House by a vote of 33–15 and now heads to the desk of Governor Jim Pillen, who has said he will sign it. The measure initially passed the Senate on Tuesday, when lawmakers also voted 33–15 to add the abortion ban as an amendment to the existing gender-affirming care bill.

The rotunda and gallery were packed with people protesting against the bill, chanting so loudly that lawmakers struggled to hear each other. At one point, when Republican Senator Kathleen Krauth began speaking, protesters erupted so loudly that security cleared the gallery. Demonstrators threw tampons onto the chamber floor before they were escorted out.

“Nothing I say matters in this chamber, so I am going to say the unvarnished truth,” Senator Machaela Cavanaugh said during the final debate. “This place is morally bankrupt, that you are playing political games with parents and children in this state to get something. It’s gross. It’s vile.”

The Nebraska legislature failed last month to pass a six-week abortion ban, after two typically anti-abortion senators voted “present.” Republicans then pushed the 12-week ban by folding it into the anti-trans bill.

The measure will ban abortion after 12 weeks. Exceptions would only be made for rape, incest, or to save the pregnant person’s life. The bill would also prohibit people under 18 from receiving puberty blockers, hormone therapies, and genital or nongenital surgeries. Genital surgeries are not performed in Nebraska, but Republicans have banned them anyway.

The state’s chief medical officer—who is simply an ear, nose, and throat specialist appointed by the Republican governor—would be able to set rules and regulations that would allow gender-affirming medications in certain situations. The bill’s supporters say this is a compromise, but critics worry this authority could be used to create a blanket ban instead of more flexibility.

State Democrats, led by Cavanaugh and Senator Megan Hunt, have sought to block anti-trans legislation by filibustering every single bill that came up during the legislative session. But they were finally defeated on Friday.

Kevin McCarthy and Republicans have been staunch in risking global default by demanding the government cut social services and make working people’s lives harder. On Friday, as Republicans continue to drag their feet on allowing the government to raise the debt limit, McCarthy tweeted another of his stubborn aphorisms:

And indeed, Washington could spend less. For instance, America’s 2024 proposed military budget is some $842 billion—$100 billion more than 2022, and $26 billion more than 2023. But if America isn’t ready to confront its inflated military budget yet, there is one very easy solution, as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez noted:

The most outlandishly rich have long benefited from tax breaks and loopholes that maintain and even expand such vulgar levels of wealth. But twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and liable for sexual abuse former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill opened up those channels more. It brought such wild provisions, including allowing the full price of private jets to be deducted in the first year.

A poignant example of how this came into practice is in the tale of longtime Republican donor Mori Hosseini, who made his fortune as a homebuilder in Florida. After spending $19.5 million on a private jet in 2017, he netted nearly $8 million in tax savings immediately, ProPublica reports. And that was just to start out with.

Soon enough, Hosseini, a close advisor to Ron DeSantis, taxied the governor and his family around like a friend giving another a ride. In 2019, ProPublic notes, Hosseini’s jet carried DeSantis’s wife Casey from Tallahassee to Jacksonville for a fundraiser hosted by—and this is not made up—a defense contractor.

In February 2021, just one month after Ted Cruz failed to lead an effort to overturn the certification of the presidential election results in Arizona and Pennsylvania, millions of people in his home state of Texas were suffering without power during a historical and deadly winter storm. Cruz, however, was on his way to Cancun to soak in a little sun, while his constituents struggled to stay warm enough to keep breathing.

It’s a legacy that will stay with Cruz, but amid the escalating viciousness of his party, he has been able to shed the association ever so slightly. However, on Friday, he gave us a reminder of how cartoonishly callous he most certainly is.

It’s all a joke. The pain, the suffering, the heightened contradictions his departure from his constituents revealed—it’s all just funny to him.

At least 246 people died in that storm, one of the worst natural disasters in Texas’s history; victims ranged in age from less than 1 year old to 102. People were stuck in the snow, some were unable to obtain necessary medical treatments, others were found dead alone in rural communities with little support.

In Houston, The New York Times reported, an Ethiopian immigrant died in her idling car, inside her garage, where she sat while charging her phone.

“She tried to drink water,” said Negash Desta, a relative of the deceased, Etenesh Mersha. “After she told her friend she couldn’t talk anymore, there was no response after that.” Her daughter was found dead, while her husband and son were hospitalized.

Recall too: resorting to finding power wherever one could (at risk of carbon monoxide poisoning), going out into the cold for help, dying alone—all of it was happening amid the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

And still. To Ted Cruz, the human suffering, the real-world implications of an energy policy so reliant on fossil fuels, of a government system that can leave so many to die such cold, lonely deaths—it’s all a little punch line.