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September 23, 2009

For Immediate Release:

Denver Republican Activist Couple to Advocate for Marijuana Legalization
Before National Audience This Weekend
Jessica and Rob Corry join growing list of conservatives, including Congressman (Ret.) Tom Tancredo,
in questioning the viability of federal marijuana prohibition

DENVER—Jessica Peck Corry and Robert J. Corry, Jr., Republican activists actively involved in promoting various conservative causes, will both address a national audience on drug reform issues at the National Organization For the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) national conference in San Francisco this weekend where they will call on fellow Republicans to push for an end to marijuana prohibition.

“We’re utilizing this platform together—as parents and as a couple—because we’re tired of the government trying to parent our children for us,” said the Corrys, who are parents to two young daughters. “This is about morality, and there is simply nothing more immoral when it comes to the Drug War than bankrupting our children’s future with billions of dollars every year to fund a war on marijuana, a substance far less harmful than alcohol. The time is now for a new Republican Party—one that trusts the people, not the government, to make the important decisions in our lives.” Learn more about the NORML conference at www.NORML.org.
The Corrys join a growing number of western Republican leaders calling for marijuana’s legalization. Earlier this year, retired Congressman Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican, publicly voiced support for legalization, joining Congressman Ron Paul of Texas, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson and former New Mexico GOP Chairman John Dendahl, who previously served as the state’s economic development secretary.
Tancredo voiced support for the Corrys’ efforts. “The time has come to recognize that states and communities know best how to regulate the use and sale of marijuana,” he said Wednesday. “It is not the legitimate business of the federal government to tell states they can or cannot end the prohibition on possession or use of a drug that is less harmful than alcohol.”
Dendahl, a former member of the U.S. Ski Team and now a Colorado resident, concurred. “As George Santayana warned, we insist on ignoring the past so we are condemned to repeat it. But the unintended bad consequences of the so-called War on Drugs are orders of magnitude worse than anything connected with Prohibition 80-90 years ago. We need a new game plan, and putting marijuana on the same footing as alcohol is the right place to begin.”
SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Jessica Peck Corry will be joined by her husband in speaking as part of a national panel of experts on the role of parenting in the context of marijuana prohibition at NORML’s national conference in San Francisco on Saturday, September 26th. She is a lifelong Republican, and in 2004, narrowly lost that year’s closest Colorado Senate race, edged out by a two-term Democratic incumbent who outspent Jessica more than four-to-one.
Jessica, now 30, serves as a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Golden. She previously worked as a Republican press secretary in the United States Senate and in 2006, served as the Republican Chair of Guarding Our Children Against Marijuana Prohibition. She was named one of Colorado’s top political “movers and shakers” by the Colorado Statesman in 2007, and was highlighted as one of Colorado’s most influential political women by the Denver Examiner in 2008. She gave the keynote address at NORML’s national student conference in Boulder earlier this year. Her national media appearances include Rolling Stone, the Wall Street Journal, MTV’s “Choose or Lose,” FOX News, in addition to many others. Together with her husband, she also recently began co-authoring a conservative blog for the liberal Huffington Post.
In addition to speaking on NORML’s parenting panel, Robert J. Corry, Jr., will also provide an additional address about emerging issues surrounding medical marijuana regulation in Colorado and around the nation. He is a Denver-based civil rights and criminal defense attorney, specializing in protecting the rights and interests of Colorado’s nearly 10,000 registered medical marijuana patients. Also a committed Republican, he previously served as Republican Counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C. In 2008, he served as spokesman for the grassroots campaign that successfully defeated Referendum O, a legislative attack seeking to limit citizen-access to the initiative process. He has won several national awards for his advocacy on behalf of conservative causes and was named one of America’s top young lawyers by the National Law Journal. His advocacy efforts have been featured by media across the nation, including the Oprah Winfrey Show, Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, and the Bill O’Reilly Show.
Jessica Corry can be reached at 720-628-5756 or by email at Jessica@JessicaCorry.com. Her biography is available at www.JessicaCorry.com.
Robert Corry can be reached at 720-383-1111 or by email at Robert.Corry@comcast.net. His biography is available at www.RobCorry.com.

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This column originally appeared in the Colorado Springs Gazette on August 27, 2009

By Jessica Peck Corry

Guest columnist

Four years have passed since that heated summer of 2005 when the U.S. Supreme Court shocked our national conscience by declaring that government can forcibly condemn a family’s home simply to make way for a more lucrative private development. While Colorado lawmakers responded by banning such a practice here, new threats to property ownership emerge every day.

Property rights are the nation’s least sexy — and most often forgotten — civil right. As Americans, we take for granted that when we purchase a home, no one can take it from us, except in rare exceptions based on overwhelming proof of public need. But in too many cases, this simply isn’t true.

Put simply, eminent domain, or the government’s taking of private property for a public use, is allowed under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but only upon just compensation being provided to the displaced property owner. Unfortunately, this clear mandate has been chipped away at through cases over the last half-century, culminated in Kelo v. New London, a case out of Connecticut, where the government attempted to bulldoze a series of homes to make way for a private pharmaceutical giant’s new headquarters. Until the very end, the case’s lead plaintiff, Suzette Kelo, fought tirelessly to save her little pink cottage in New London’s blue collar Fort Trumble neighborhood.

While the final outcome was not in Kelo’s favor, legislatures across the nation, including Colorado, subsequently voted to prohibit eminent domain for economic development purposes like those upheld in the case. In an ideal world, it could be argued that one woman’s sacrifice spared countless Americans from a similar fate.

But, of course, we don’t live in an ideal world. Over the past four years, southern Colorado has played host to a series of its own property rights battles. In 2006, thousands of families descended upon the state Capitol in Denver to successfully curb an effort to condemn thousands of properties to make way for a proposed private toll road known as “Super Slab.” Momentum behind this movement helped elect Marsha Looper, a Calhan Republican, to the state House.

Southern Colorado is also host to the ongoing debate over whether the military should be permitted to take working ranches outside Trinidad to make way for expanded military training. This process is particularly painful as it pits against each other two of America’s greatest symbols of our fighting spirit — the western cowboy and the American soldier.

And of equal importance: while the downturned economy has meant that government has less of our hard-earned tax dollars to use toward land redevelopment experiments, it also means that property owners targeted for condemnation face an even greater uphill battle. In at least a few cases coming out of Denver’s suburbs, property owners being moved out to make way for the Regional Transportation District’s light rail expansion have been offered compensation lower than the assessed value or mortgaged value of their properties.

While RTD can claim that current real estate realities affect almost all property owners adversely, those targeted with eminent domain have lost the option to wait out the downturn and recoup the full investment value of their properties.

During a recent Colorado Springs visit, I was encouraged by the response I received from three of the region’s most committed policy makers, Sen. Bill Cadman and Rep. Kent Lambert, and retired Senate Republican leader Andy McElhany. In addition, all Coloradans have a property rights champion in state Rep. Corry Gardner, a Yuma Republican, who has continuously taken on special interests to protect against unjust condemnation.

As these legislators spend these next several months developing their policy agendas for the 2010 session, we can only hope property rights don’t take a back seat to other pressing economic needs. After all, and even as real estate prices continue to slump in the short term, home ownership remains the single most important tool we have to promote the ability of citizens to forge their own path toward long-term financial independence and sustainability. Inevitably, it is too often poor, elderly, and minority communities victimized by abusive condemnation.

The most dangerous threat today comes from our courts, including the Colorado Supreme Court, which took a serious swipe at property rights last summer by ruling that government can condemn property — even if outside its own jurisdiction — for open space purposes. The decision has already emboldened local governments to more aggressively threaten condemnation for such purposes.

Just imagine if instead the court had ruled that local governments could exempt themselves from civil rights statutes prohibiting race and gender discrimination, freeing governments to use taxpayer dollars to promote racially segregated lunch counters or classrooms. People would be justly rioting in the streets.

Colorado property owners concerned about their fate must take a stand. If one woman in a little pink cottage was able to force the entire nation to wake up to property rights abuses, so can you.

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Corry is the director of the Independence Institute’s Property Rights Project.