“Sources close to… Sweeney said” the renewed push to get legalization through would come after the November elections, most likely “during the lame-duck session between Election Day and January,” according to the Patch.
That’s a real turnaround for Sweeney, who announced in May that he was ending efforts to pass the bill because he didn’t have the votes for it. At the time, he said the most likely path to legalization was for the state’s voters to decide the issue in a November 2020 ballot referendum. But that would mean another year of pot prohibition.
Sweeney and Murphy were also at odds over investigations by the administration into whether corporations misused tax breaks in the past. One of the companies being scrutinized is owned by state Democratic powerbroker George Norcross, a Sweeney ally. Once the investigations got underway, negotiations between Sweeney and Murphy over the pot bill stalled.
Questions of what has prompted Sweeney to change his mind now and whether he has the five votes he lacked in May remain unclear, but the Senate leader is definitely signaling he’s ready to try to push the bill through.