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The Republican senator who heads up the Banking Committee says the fact that marijuana remains illegal at the federal level while more states legalize it has created a “quandary” for cannabis businesses and banks that wish to serve them.
“Congress is going to have to make it legal, because today even though the president has declassified it or reduced its impact, the truth is it is still illegal,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who chairs the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, said on Tuesday, referring to the Trump administration’s recent move to federally reschedule marijuana.
“Therefore the banking system cannot allow access to our federal banking system. You can on the state level—but on the federal level, until it becomes a legal conversation, until that’s solved,” you can’t, the senator said.
Scott said he does think the issue will get solved, pointing to legislation called the Secure and Fair Enforcement Regulation (SAFER) Banking Act that would provide federal protections to banks that work with state-legal cannabis businesses. Versions of that legislation have been passed by the House of Representatives several times but have never received a vote on the Senate floor.
The bill would “allow for the banking question to be solved by making it legal to bank it,” Scott said. “What you don’t want is to have a situation where you have these cash rooms where you have hundreds of thousands of dollars cash sitting in a location. Everyone knows you can’t bank it and therefore the criminal activity is much higher in these places.”
Despite articulating the main argument for the reform in his new comments at the Milken Institute’s Global Conference, Scott has opposed cannabis banking legislation in the past—including when it advanced through the panel he now chairs under prior Democratic control in 2023.
The SAFER Banking Act has not yet been refiled in either chamber during the current 119th Congress, which began in January 2025.
Scott also spoke on Tuesday about how he’s “not agnostic” on the broader cannabis issue, saying he’s “got a strong opinion” and raising concerns about what he called the “synthetic nature of marijuana and how it’s 300 percent stronger than it was naturally.”
“That’s a different conversation,” he said. “The real conservations we’re having though is about about access to the banking system.”
“There is a quandary that we have to solve,” the senator said. “I think we’ll get to a solution.”
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Scott, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, previously served in the House, where he voted against an amendment to protect state medical cannabis programs from federal interference.
At an American Bankers Association (ABA) Washington Summit in 2023, Scott said that the federal-state marijuana banking conflict will “come to a conclusion likely in this Congress.”
He stressed the importance of addressing the SAFE Banking Act during regular order, calling it “an important decision, as opposed to rushing it to the floor.”
“There are Republicans who’ve come out very positively on behalf of the SAFE Act. I’m not one of those Republicans, but there is a bipartisan coalition who wants to have a serious conversation about the challenges that it would solve,” he said at the time. “And the question is: does that legislation actually solve more challenges than it creates harm?”
Scott also said that lawmakers need to take on the broader debate about federal marijuana legalization, which is “something that we’re going to have to wrestle with as a nation and as a Congress and get to an answer there.”
“But there is a bipartisan coalition who wants to have that conversation, so I think that’s good news,” he said. “Both sides want to go through regular order—that’s better news. I think we’ll come to a conclusion likely in this Congress.”
Tom Angell is the editor of Marijuana Moment. A 25-year veteran in the cannabis and drug law reform movement, he covers the policy, politics, science and culture of marijuana, psychedelics and other substances. He previously reported for Forbes, Marijuana.com and MassRoots, and was given the Hunter S. Thompson Media Award by NORML and has been named Journalist of the Year by Americans for Safe Access. As an activist, Tom founded the nonprofit Marijuana Majority and handled media relations, campaigns and lobbying for Law Enforcement Against Prohibition and Students for Sensible Drug Policy.
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