Andy Harris, the much-mocked Congressman from the Eastern Shore (you remember his weird winks, right?), is in trouble.Harris probably knew he would anger liberals when he tried (but failed) to ban legal pot in D.C. But it turns out that that move rankled his fellow Republicans as well. And now former state delegate Michael Smigiel has said that he plans to challenge Harris in the 2016 Republican primary–in part because Smigiel thinks Harris’s anti-pot stance is wrong.
Smigiel is challenging Harris from the right, arguing that any good Libertarian-leaning Republican should believe that state laws trump federal laws… so if D.C. wants to legalize marijuana, that’s their prerogative. Smigiel even teamed up with his ideological opposite, Heather Mizeur to pen the state’s decriminalization bill.
Harris’s chief of staff told the Guardian that they were not worried about this challenge from Smigiel, who he deemed “not a serious person.”
