Today's politics recap
- Donald Trump considered issuing blanket pardons for those who participated in the Capitol insurrection before he left office, according to a new report. Asked yesterday about the former president’s comments, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said he would not support shortening any of the insurrectionists’ prison sentences.
- Joe Biden said the deployment of approximately 3,000 US troops to parts of Eastern Europe is “totally consistent” with what he had told Russia’s president Vladimir Putin earlier. “There is one aggressor here, that aggressor is Russia,” the White House reiterated in the media briefing via press secretary Jen Psaki, arguing the US, as part of NATO, was bolstering Ukraine’s resistance to Russian advances, not provoking Putin.
- The US president pledged that ending cancer is a “White House priority”, promising to bring a sense of urgency in the administration’s “moonshot” program to the fight against the disease. Biden announced a number of new initiatives including a newly created “cancer cabinet” which will include 18 federal departments, offices, and agencies.
– Guardian staff
Updated
Mississippi’s governor Tate Reeves signed a bill legalizing marijuana for people with some medical conditions.
The Republican governor was initially noncommittal on whether he would sign the bill.
From the AP:
The bill says patients could buy up to to 3.5 grams of cannabis per day, up to six days a week. That is about 3 ounces per month. The bill also sets taxes on production and sale of cannabis, and it specifies that plants must be grown indoors under controlled conditions.
The bill had enough support to override a veto had Reeves decided not to support it.
