Cannabis Banking Provision Removed From Defense Spending Bill in the Senate
A House provision allowing banks to provide credit cards, checking accounts and other financial services to legal cannabis businesses failed to survive negotiations with the Senate and was left out of legislation setting federal defense policy for the 12 months that began Oct. 1.
The House had added the Secure and Fair Enforcement, or SAFE, Banking Act as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, but the Senate balked at including the provision and it was removed from the final legislation.
“As has been the case with cannabis reforms nationally, progress takes time but the will of the people will prevail,” said Rep. Ed Perlmutter, D-Colo., the banking bill’s chief sponsor. “The SAFE Banking Act has been sitting in the Senate for three years and with every passing day their unwillingness to deal with the issue endangers and harms businesses, their employees, and communities across the country.”
Steven Hawkins, chief executive of the U.S. Cannabis Council, said he was disappointed that the banking provision didn’t make it into the final defense measure.
“We see the consequences every day of the lack of banking access, from the rash of dispensary robberies to the ongoing challenges of minority and small business owners to secure capital,” Hawkins said. “The SAFE Banking Act would provide urgently needed relief to cannabis businesses of all sizes and put wind in the sails of the broader push to end federal cannabis prohibition.”
Both Perlmutter and Hawkins said they would continue to try to get the banking measure through the current Congress.
A leading advocate of overhauling marijuana laws, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, opposed adding the banking provision to the defense bill, saying the provision should pass in combination with social justice provisions.
He said he needed the support of big cannabis companies and investors who support SAFE Banking to also push for the restorative justice legislation, so he wanted to keep both elements in one bill.
“Our nation’s cannabis laws are fundamentally broken and in need of urgent reform,” Booker said. “Although the SAFE Banking Act is common-sense policy that I support, but it has to be coupled with strong restorative justice provisions that seek to right the many injustices experienced by Black and Brown communities as part of our nation’s failed War on Drugs.”
Booker, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Finance Committee Chair Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have been working on a larger bill that would end the ban on cannabis, thus allowing banks to provide financial services without running afoul of federal law, as well as expunge marijuana convictions and help communities hardest hit by the drug wars.
But several minority business owners said that without the banking bill, they have found it hard to get the financing they need to compete with larger cannabis companies.
SAFE Banking first passed the House in September 2019 on a bipartisan vote, the time either chamber of Congress had approved a pro-marijuana measure. House Democrats also inserted the provision in two trillion-dollar coronavirus stimulus bills in 2020. The Senate, then under Republican control, never considered the bill.