Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate elected leaders for their respective conferences on Tuesday as they prepare to take on minority status in the 120th Congress that starts early next year.
GOP lawmakers elevated the two lawmakers—who both have long histories of strongly opposing marijuana reform—even as the Trump administration is moving forward with a plan to federally reschedule cannabis.
House of Representatives
On the House side, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) was elected by his party colleagues to take on the role of minority leader.
Jordan, who currently chairs the Judiciary Committee, has voted against more than two dozen cannabis reform proposals during his tenure, including measures to legalize marijuana, protect state laws from federal interference, increase the industry’s access to banking services, help military veterans obtain medical cannabis and promote research on the plant.
In his previous role as ranking member of the Judiciary Committee in 2021, Jordan blasted then-majority House Democrats for moving to federally legalize cannabis through the Marijuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act, calling it a “radical, out-of-touch Democrat priority” and a “marijuana stimulus bill.”
Jordan also authored a “minority views” section of an extensive report prepared for House lawmakers in 2022 that outlined the GOP arguments against the legalization bill as it headed to the floor.
“This bill is an enormous federal subsidy and stimulus for the marijuana industry,” he wrote. “This extreme and unwise bill would open the floodgates to marijuana cultivation, distribution, and sale within the United States—allowing bad actors and transnational criminal organizations to further exploit America’s addiction crisis.”
Jordan’s section of the report also complained that the legislation would create a “significant federal bureaucracy that would include new taxes, expansive grant programs, and a federal licensing regime.” The minority party view at the time, according to the document, was that the reform would also “incentivize bad actors and transnational criminal organizations to flood American streets with drugs.”
The ranking member’s report section also said the MORE Act “fails to set limitations on the amount of tetrahydrocannabinol in marijuana or its extracts or concentrates.” But it seemingly contradicts itself by saying that while “some states have placed limits on the tetrahydrocannabinol in marijuana concentrate products, none of the states that have legalized marijuana have placed any such restrictions.” In fact, Vermont has enacted a THC potency limit on legal cannabis products.
“H.R. 3617 would open the floodgates of marijuana cultivation, distribution, and sales throughout the United States with little to no controls whatsoever,” Jordan claimed in the report. “Bad actors, domestic criminal enterprises, and transnational criminal organizations would exploit the numerous loopholes in this legislation… This bill is an extreme and unwise measure.”
When the House Democratic majority passed the MORE Act on the House floor for the first time in 2020, Jordan gave a speech slamming the cannabis bill’s tax provisions.
“This bill—it’s not enough just to legalize marijuana. They want taxpayers to pay for it,” he said of Democrats. “This bill sets up a grant program. This is the marijuana business infrastructure bill.”
Jordan also spoke against the MORE Act before it passed on the House floor for the second time in 2022, arguing that Democrats were moving the legalize marijuana because they “can’t deal with the real problems facing the American people” such as “the inflation problem, the energy problem, the illegal immigration problem on our southern border.”
In a separate floor speech in 2022, Jordan suggested that “Democrats could have shown their support for law enforcement” but instead were moving to “legalize marijuana.
In a letter to a constituent in 2021, Jordan claimed that “marijuana is illegal for sound reasons”—saying that it is “properly listed as a Schedule I drug under the Controlled Substances Act” because of research that he argued shows various health harms.
“While I am deeply sympathetic to those who suffer from painful illnesses and diseases, I do not believe that our society should place its faith in legalizing medical marijuana. Reports show that almost any adult who enters a medical marijuana facility complaining of a headache can leave with marijuana–and then distribute the drug to anyone. In several states, even 18-year-old high school students can obtain marijuana prescriptions and have them filled at state-authorized dispensaries. Further attempts to legalize the drug would only undermine our efforts to curb illegal drug use, setting a bad example for children and threatening the development of legitimate cures and medicines.”
“As the ranking Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, I fully support efforts to keep marijuana illegal,” the GOP congressman wrote. “We must enforce and strengthen existing drug laws while doing more to foster healthy communities and families.”
Here’s a list of 27 times that Jordan voted against marijuana reform proposals in Congress:
Legalize marijuana
Protect state medical cannabis laws from federal interference
Protect all state marijuana laws from federal interference
Protect state CBD laws from federal interference
Prevent marijuana use from justifying security clearance denials
Expand medical cannabis research
Let Department of Veterans Affairs doctors recommend medical cannabis
Protect industrial hemp programs from federal interference
Expand marijuana industry banking access
Remove cannabis research barriers and express support for legalization
Remove protections for universities that study marijuana (an anti-reform amendment that Jordan supported)
Create hemp research programs
Committee vote on legalizing cannabis
Voters in Jordan’s home state of Ohio approved a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in 2023.
Senate
Meanwhile in the Senate, Republicans chose to keep Sen. John Thune (R-SD), who currently serves as majority leader, to maintain his role as head of the GOP conference as they party heads into minority status in the chamber next year.
Thune not only opposes legalizing marijuana, but has also called for a reversal of efforts to reschedule cannabis and has criticized Democrats for working to increase the industry’s access to banking services.
The top GOP senator joined other Republican lawmakers in a letter in 2024 challenging the Biden administration’s marijuana rescheduling push that the Trump administration has now advanced, urging that the policy proposal be trashed.
The rescheduling rule “fails to provide adequate science and data to support moving marijuana to schedule III and should not have been signed or published,” the letter Thune signed said, calling it “irresponsible” for federal health officials to “make this determination when emerging research shows that there are significant health concerns associated with marijuana use.”
The letter detailed Thune and other Republican lawmakers’ concerns about marijuana’s health effects, suggesting that there is a “clear association between cannabis use and psychosis, anxiety, cognitive failures, respiratory adverse events, cancer, cardiovascular outcomes and gastrointestinal disorders.”
It also claimed that “sexual disfunction was twice as high in men who used marijuana” and that “marijuana use among veterans with PTSD was associated with worse PTSD symptoms, more violent behavior, and alcohol use.”
Beyond criticizing cannabis use and policy reform, the letter Thune signed further called into question whether marijuana has any medical value.
“Medical marijuana dispensaries sell edibles and vapes that come in flavors like passion raspberry, blueberry calm, wild cherry, and sour apple,” it said. “Pretending that these products are medicine that can treat health conditions is doing a disservice to Americans.”
“It remains the case that marijuana has no currently accepted medical use,” Thune and his Republican colleague wrote. “The fact that states have labeled marijuana as ‘medicine’ does not change the nature of the drug… We urge you to withdraw this proposal and maintain marijuana as a schedule I drug.”
Separately, as Senate Democrats moved to advance a marijuana legalization bill in 2021, Thune said that cannabis reform is “something we’ll probably have to grapple with here.” But he’s consistently opposed even modest proposals to allow marijuana industry banking.
In 2024, Thune said attaching cannabis banking legislation to an aviation bill would be “a non-starter,” noting that Republican opposition to the idea is “very strong.”
He called the then-Democratic-controlled House’s proposal to include marijuana banking reform in a large-scale coronavirus relief bill “crazy stuff” in 2020, complaining in a floor speech that the text of the underlying legislation mentions “cannabis” more times than “jobs.”
“In case Democrats didn’t realize, Americans aren’t suffering from a lack of cannabis right now,” Thune said in a speech on the Senate floor. “They’re suffering from a lack of employment.”
He also said that Democrats’ push to advance a marijuana legalization bill was a “great illustration of the gap in priorities.”
“While Republicans are continuing to negotiate on COVID relief, Democrats are holding votes on a Tiger King bill & legalizing cannabis,” he said. “Let’s get serious & do our job for Americans.”
In August of this year, Thune effectively voted to delay the scheduled federal recriminalization of hemp THC products, an issue that has divided people within the cannabis reform movement.
Back in 2014, Thune said that while he understands that “people have strong opinions on both sides of this debate, I do not support legalizing the use of marijuana.”
“Currently, the medical benefits from the use of marijuana are still inconclusive, and I believe that we must be careful not to increase the availability of marijuana and the use of marijuana for non-medical reasons,” the senator said in a constituent letter. “However, I support the development of alternative medications that will provide relief to patients without opening the door to substance abuse.”
The next year, he called legalization a “dangerous path,” adding that voters who enacted the reform in Colorado are “going to pay a price for it.”
In 2021, Thune acknowledged that cannabis is an “area that’s still evolving, and our country’s views on it are evolving,” adding that “how we deal with it nationally I think is still an open question.”
“Medical’s getting big — the recreational not as big yet, but it’s growing — and there’ll be more initiatives on the ballot,” he said.
Thune’s opposition to marijuana reform comes despite that fact that voters in his state approved a marijuana legalization initiative at the ballot in 2020—though it was overturned by the state Supreme Court. Voters subsequently rejected legalization proposals in 2022 and 2024. A medical cannabis measure that passed in 2020 remains law in the state.
