The Safe and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act has a long history on Capitol Hill. First introduced to the House in 2017 as the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Act by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO), this landmark piece of legislation would provide legal protection for banks that work with cannabis businesses — something drastically needed as state-legal cannabis industries are burgeoning across the country despite federal prohibition. SAFER would make it possible for cannabis businesses to bank their money just like any other retail, farming or production enterprise.
“It was designed to allow banks to provide legitimate banking services to legitimate businesses in [cannabis legal] states,” Perlmutter recently told Denver’s 9News. “Credit cards, deposit accounts, payroll accounts, those kinds of things, so we don’t have this big giant pile of cash that then attracts crime.”
The SAFER Banking Act has passed the House seven times since it was first introduced. It has grown in scope, complexity and political compromise — but it has never made it to a Senate vote.
But that could soon change. On Oct. 2, after revising several elements of the SAFER Banking Act, the Senate Banking Committee voted to advance the act to the Senate floor. And while cannabis activists, business owners and advocacy groups are excited to see the SAFER Act finally progress to this point, the legislation still has a long way to go before it ever makes it to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Morgan Fox, the political director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), points out that the most immediate hurdle for the SAFER Banking Act is actually getting it on the schedule for a Senate floor vote. Fox, who works on Capitol Hill, says things are currently “keyed up” in Washington, and cannabis is not high on anyone’s priority list.
“The focus is on the political jockeying going on in the House and on avoiding a government shutdown, which in the Senate nobody really wants,” Fox says. But, he adds, their organization has been assured that the intent is to get SAFER to a floor vote as soon as possible. And Fox says he’s confident that Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) won’t bring it to the floor unless he knows he has the votes to get it passed.
Then, should the SAFER Banking Act actually pass the Senate vote, it would go back to the House. And some conservative representatives like Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO), who voted in favor of a previous version of the SAFER Banking Act, have publicly expressed that they won’t support it this time around.
Leutkemeyer’s issue with the Senate Banking Comittee’s version of SAFER has to do with a revised portion of the bill called “Section 10” concerning “requirements for deposit accounts.” He and other conservative representatives believe this section is too broadly defined and could lead to bank discrimination against controversial businesses like firearms companies, payday lenders and others.
Fox disagrees with that reasoning.
“The pendulum can swing both ways,” he says. If Section 10 was some Democratic scheme to allow banks to discriminate against firearms businesses, it would be short sighted.
“The same sort of tactics could be used against Democrats with things like reproductive services providers,” Fox points out, and no one is worried that’s going to happen.
There’s nothing in the current version of the SAFER Banking Act that Fox says he’d consider a “poison pill,” or that NORML wouldn’t stand by. This is a huge opportunity for politicians to prove to the American people that they can come together on bipartisan issues, he adds. It’s an opportunity for the federal government to take a progressive step that would directly benefit thousands of American businesses.
“Obviously there’s still a lot of work to be done when it comes to cannabis policy reform, and even if [SAFER] doesn’t pass, it is certainly still a step in the right direction,” Fox says.
