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Republicans now having taken control of the House of Representatives are ending the Capitol Hill smoking ban.
And this is so funny because it is so emblematic of this contrarian, merely for the sake of being contrarian, Republican thinking that we see on everything from electric vehicles – like Wyoming looking to phase out new electric vehicle sales by 2035 – and in so many other places, where they just love to be contrarian, because they think they’re owning the LIBS or fighting back against the man or whatever the case may be.
And it’s so stupid. So the rules are, as reported by Fox News and others, smoking indoors is illegal in Washington, DC. The Capitol is under federal jurisdiction, it can set its own rules on issues like tobacco use. As Fox News reports, lawmakers and staff will once again be allowed to smoke carefree after Republicans ended the prohibition against tobacco.
Upon taking the majority of the House of Representatives, this ban started in 2007. Under then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in their own offices, members are still allowed to smoke or were still allowed to smoke. But this is now going to expand the places where you can indeed smoke. This is just kind of gross, you know, and the funny thing about the smoking issues specifically, is when you go back to the start of when – listen, we’ve known for a long time as humans that smoking is bad for you – but I’m talking about when it was like really pretty damn obvious – but we started to see a lot of money, often designed to help the restaurant industry that had patrons who would smoke and that was part of the appeal of being there, start to fund research that said, the links not really clear between smoking and lung cancer. And on and on.
That issue morphed into the more general nanny state reactions that we would hear from many Republicans when you would hear about oh, New York wants to ban huge sodas, for example, because they’re so unhealthy or whatever the case, the right would start to take this kind of catch all approach, which is that’s nanny state stuff. Let us smoke if we want to, let us have the big sodas, if we want to, there may be consequences, maybe not science has been wrong, but just let us do whatever we want. And we can sort of suffer the consequences.
Of course, the problem with all of these things, is that to some degree, they affect more than just the individuals. Smoking is the obvious one, when you talk about secondhand smoke, and even third hand smoke, non-smokers who get smoke on them from being near a smoker, that second hand then go home, and then now their kids, for example, are breathing in the smoke on their clothes. So this is, listen, I don’t know how many Republicans in the House actually smoke. I think a bunch of this is actually about cigars and not cigarettes. And the idea of we passed the bill, let’s get together and you know, smoke a cigar or whatever the case may be. But it’s part of that same self-centered, egotistical, sort of contrarian nonsense that has also invaded Republican politics. So it’s not the biggest deal in the world. I do feel bad for the staffers and the non-smokers and the families of the staffers and the non-smokers who aren’t going to partake in this, who now have no choice but to be around it. And who are you going to potentially suffer detrimental cumulative health effects. But at the end of the day, it’s very clearly not only about the smoking, it’s about reversing something that Nancy Pelosi did. It’s about being anti or at least skeptical of science. It’s all these different things together. And it really is a microcosm of that.
Now, meanwhile, as we’ve talked about, smoking, in terms of tobacco, smoking in terms of cannabis, a lot of the arguments that are made for why tobacco, why tobacco cigarettes should be legal, can also be made about cannabis.
But many Republicans reject those arguments. And so that I think is what I would call the third layer here, which is on tobacco, it’s smoke everywhere. Let people smoke in restaurants. By the way, I remember in the early 90s, you could still smoke on planes on some international flights, which seems completely insane now but Republicans saying smoke cigarettes everywhere. Cannabis, very dangerous, shouldn’t be illegal. Absolutely. Not alcohol. Totally fine cannabis. Absolutely not. That’s the next layer of hypocrisy. I don’t think we’re necessarily going to resolve that here today. But if there’s any potential good that could come of this, it might be maybe some of these Republicans rethinking their views on cannabis, particularly since we know that Americans are more in favor now that in any previous period believe cannabis should be legal in most circumstances.
