Ted Cruz isn’t exactly the most understanding guy on the Presidential ballot.
When it comes to illegal immigration, he’s gotten progressively angrier as time (and Donald Trump) has worn on, most recently calling for a mass deportation of undocumented workers, and a wall along our shared border with Mexico. He’s decidedly anti-abortion, anti-Planned Parenthood, pro-gun, and personally ready to do battle with terrorists in the Middle East and beyond. All of these are pretty standard modern Republican positions.
But unlike a number of his competitors, Ted Cruz is surprisingly libertarian when it comes to letting you smoke your pot in peace—at least, if you live in a state where recreational or medicinal marijuana use is legal.
According to two interviews Cruz gave over the weekend, while Cruz wouldn’t personally vote to decriminalize marijuana, as President, he would openly embrace the Tenth Amendment value of federalism and respect that Federal drug enforcement provisions do not supersede state law: “I would vote against marijuana legalization. If the state of Texas had a referendum on it, I would vote no. But I think it is the prerogative of the states to make that determination. I think the people of Colorado have the right to make the decision that they’ve made under the Constitution, and as president I would respect that right.”
He couched his assent by saying that he wasn’t sure Colorado’s grand experiment with marijuana legalization has worked, but he’s willing to wait and see—and no matter how fun the guy seemed in college, if you happen to end up standing next to Ted Cruz at Coachella, you may want to avoid offering to share your stash. But this is a far cry from where Ted Cruz was just two years ago, when he was lecturing the Obama Administration for refusing to prosecute Federal drug crimes in states like Colorado, where legalization referendums had passed. It might be safe to say that on pot use, Ted Cruz has officially evolved.
Republican candidates, as a whole, are split on the marijuana issue. Gov. John Kasich is firmly anti-pot, though he’s occasionally admitted to some curiosity about medicinal marijuana use. And while Donald Trump was, like everyone, just fine with legalizing pretty much everything in the 1990s, he’s since pulled back his unqualified support for getting high, and now draws the line, firmly, at supporting only medicinal marijuana. That might be the result of pow-wowing with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who was so anti-drug from his time as a prosecutor, that it almost seemed like he was ready to issue a retroactive arrest warrant when former Gov. Jeb Bush admitted during an early debate to experimenting with marijuana.
