Cannabis and Diversity: The New Democrat Stimulus Bill

With much ado, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) cut the ribbon on her new $3 trillion coronavirus relief bill on Tuesday, unveiling a pork-packed box of goodies for progressives, feminists, race hustlers, and everyone else who isn’t a normal, hardworking American citizen.

Pelosi’s bill, which is unlikely to find much enthusiasm in the Senate, is the latest example of the Democrats using the coronavirus pandemic as a weak excuse to push forward a liberal agenda that has little or nothing to do with the public health crisis at hand. Certainly, given the fact that the entire bill only mentions the word “economy” twice, it’s clear that Pelosi’s priorities are elsewhere.

You might have to take a magnifying glass to the bill in order the find the word “economy,” but the word “diversity” will jump out at you; it appears a whopping 20 times throughout the package. Oh, this bill is all about diversity. You’ll see that from its bizarre fixation on environmental justice. According to the bill, $50 million will be earmarked for “environmental justice grants to prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.”

And what would those do? They would empower the EPA to “investigate or address the disproportionate impacts of the COVID–19 pandemic in environmental justice communities.”

Environmental justice communities.

Ooookay.

Strangely enough, the word “cannabis” pops up an astounding 68 times in the bill. For instance, the Washington Free Beacon points out: “One provision of the bill would force federal banking regulators to issue an annual ‘diversity and inclusion report’ to Congress on ‘minority-owned and women-owned cannabis-related legitimate businesses.’”

Now we’re cooking.

“We face the biggest catastrophe in our nation’s history,” Pelosi said of the HEROES Act. “This is a moment when many millions of our fellow Americans are in deep suffering. We must have empathy for our heroes. We must also empathize with the pain of families who do not know where their next meals are coming from and how to pay next month’s rent.”

Oh, we do. We do. We’re just not sure how it makes sense to send $1 trillion to states requesting a bailout from the federal government, seeing as how most of these states were in dire financial trouble long before the coronavirus reared its ugly head. We’re also not sure how extending the $600/week unemployment benefits will do anything to help these people get back to work and aid the economy in recovering from this crisis.

As for environmental justice, diversity, and cannabis, we fail to see how any of this is related to helping the “heroes” of the pandemic.