QUESTIONS: Tim Griffin has some about pot.

Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin is all for looking after voters when it comes to partisan elections, but maybe not so much when it comes to medical marijuana.

Griffin famously pitched a fit and said it was affront to voters when Democrats used House rules to legally compose a majority of the House Revenue and Taxation Committee.

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But now consider medical marijuana, comfortably approved by voters Nov. 8. Two-thirds of the states now have approved legal marijuana in some form and public support generally is even higher than the vote for the Arkansas constitutional amendment. But 40/29 has a report on Griffin’s questions about legal pot.

Griffin trots out the old jobs fig leaf. Good jobs require a drug-free workforce, Griffin says. What, workers aren’t allow to take prescription medication, even. No pain relievers? But here’s his real kicker from a 40/29 ttranscript:

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I can tell you, the whole issue of it being a felony, I mean it’s still, mariuana is still illegal under federal law and just because a state passes something doesn’t make it legal under federal law. It only makes it legal under state law. But as we know, federal law trumps state law, so there are a lot of unanswered questions.

Some Republicans have held out hope that a Trump administration would reverse Obama administration policy and begin busting marijuana users again, no matter how sick. It could happen, I guess, though the tidal wave of public sentiment argues against it. Gov. Asa Hutchinson has promised a good-faith effort to comply with voters’ wishes and work is underway by his administration to establish the regulatory scheme necessary. (I should add that a gold rush of would-be entrepreneurs and high-dollar lobbyists is also underway to carve off a piece of anticipated profits.)

A resistance to the amendment would be what Tim Griffin might call in another context an “affront” to voters. But he’s always been long on hypocrisy. He disqualified himself from being a representative of voters when he worked to toss legal voters — including many enlisted service men — off the voter rolls in Florida in 2004 to help George W. Bush.

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