President Biden and his team have decided it may not be a good idea to do anything that alienates the black vote.
Election season is almost here, the polls are closer than they'd like, so President Biden's administration has chosen to postpone a scheduled ban on menthol cigarettes in a move clearly meant to retain the black vote.
Don't take my word for it. Here's the New York Times:
The Biden administration said on Friday that it was delaying a decision on whether to ban menthol cigarettes, effectively quashing a proposal that has divided Black American voters and fueled million-dollar lobbying campaigns from the tobacco industry in this presidential election year...
Those efforts posed risks for President Biden, whose support among Black voters has at times slipped in recent months.
First, they try to jail Trump making him appeal to black voters, and now Biden is trying to win that support back by promising not to ban menthol cigarettes.
Yes, that's really what's happening here.
Politics is a heck of a game.
The Democrats claim they have a legit, non-vote-buying reason for their move, however.
"This rule has garnered historic attention, and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback, including from various elements of the civil rights and criminal justice movement," Xavier Becerra, the health and human services secretary, said in a statement. "It's clear that there are still more conversations to have, and that will take significantly more time."
Some "civil rights" leaders said banning menthol cigarettes, while meant to protect black people from cigarettes, will only end up criminalizing something like "black behavior."
The Democrats can't even do overreaching bans anymore without being accused of racism. Even if they're supposedly just trying to help.
Other Democrats think Biden is racist now for STOPPING the ban.
"Today's news from the Biden administration is a blow to the Black community, who continue to be unfairly targeted and unjustly killed by Big Tobacco," Mr. Johnson said. "Let's be clear — valuing Black lives should not be used as a pawn to get our people to the polls, but rather a platform that our leaders refuse to step down from."
So they completely stopped this plan right before the election when they needed to secure the black vote and keep ammo away from the Trump campaign.
Some see this as a cynical move.
But hey, that's politics, isn't it?
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