Lamar S. Smith

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Lamar S. Smith

Lamar Seeligson Smith (* 19th November 1947 in San Antonio , Texas ) is an American politician of the Republican Party . He was a member of the US House of Representatives from 1987 to 2018 and represented the 21st constituency of Texas, which covers an area northeast of San Antonio and west of Austin .

Life

Lamar Smith was born in San Antonio in 1947 and graduated from the Texas Military Institute there in 1965 . In 1969 he completed a Bachelor's degree program at Yale University in New Haven ( Connecticut ) and finally acquired the 1975 Juris Doctor at the Law School of Southern Methodist University in Dallas .

From 1969 to 1970 he worked as an intern in Washington, DC , then as a journalist and lawyer. He has two children with his wife Beth.

Political career

In 1978, Smith was elected chairman of the Bexar County's Republican Party . In 1980, he was elected to the Texas House of Representatives in the 57th constituency of Bexar County , serving on the Raw Materials Committee and the Fire Ant Investigative Committee. From 1982 to 1985, Smith served as Commissioner in Bexar County.

In the 1986 congressional elections , Lamar Smith was elected as his party's candidate in the 21st constituency of the state of Texas to the House of Representatives in Washington, DC , where he took up his new mandate on January 3, 1987. His last legislative term ran until January 3, 2019. During his long tenure in Congress, he was a member of various committees and sub-committees. These included the Homeland Security Committee , the United States House Committee on the Judiciary (Chairman 2011-2013), the Science and Technology Committee, and the Ethics Committee (Chairman 1999-2000).

Smith introduced the controversial SOPA bill to the US House of Representatives. Innerparteilich he belongs to the conservative Republican Study Committee and the tea party movement related Tea Party Caucus on.

In 2011, through November, Smith received $ 37,250 election donations from beer, wine, and liquor lobby groups, up from $ 65,800 total between 2009 and 2011. Maplight.Org tops the beer, wine and liquor lobby as the third largest of Smith's donors.

Political positions

abortion

Smith advocates restrictions on abortion. In 2009 he voted to ban abortions that are financially supported by the state. In 2006, Smith voted for the Abortion Pain Bill , which "was designed to ensure that women who want an abortion are fully informed of the pain it causes the unborn child . " Smith also voted for the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act , which would ban the transportation of minors for abortion in states with different abortion laws. In 2008, the National Right to Life Committee gave Smith a 100-point rating on a scale designed to rate politicians' efforts to prevent abortion.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

On April 23, 2006, CNET reported that Smith was proposing a bill to strengthen the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) restrictions on software that could circumvent copying bans and allow federal police to increase the use of wiretapping to combat copyright infringement.

SOPA

Smith is the author of the Stop Online Piracy Act , better known as "SOPA," a controversial bill against copyright infringement and other illegal activity on the Internet. In this context, the fact that until shortly before the draft law came into existence an improperly licensed image served as a background on his website.

Climate change

Lamar Smith is considered one of the most vehement climate deniers in the US Congress, who rejects man-made global warming and its consequences . From 2013 to 2018 he was chairman of the science committee of the US Congress and has since used this position to attack climate research , including through multiple use of coercive measures to hand over correspondence, e-mails and other private correspondence from climate researchers. During the approx. 4 years under Lamar's chairmanship, the Scientific Committee initiated more such coercive measures than in the previous 54 years.

He took particularly strong action against the authors of a 2015 study published in Science , who found that there was never a break in global warming . This argument is one of the most popular claims made by climate skeptics and climate deniers. Among other things, he forced the researchers to surrender data that were already public, as well as email contacts and accused them of manipulating data. In addition to such intimidation measures against climate researchers, he used his position to protect ExxonMobil from public prosecutor investigations aimed at finding out whether the oil company was deliberately hiding data on global warming.

To do this, he uses the media to spread "skeptical" arguments. On May 20, 2013, Smith published an Op-Ed article in the Washington Post , in which he spoke out against "overheated rhetoric" in the climate debate, as well as against the Obama administration's postponement of the expansion of the Keystone pipeline and the tightening of the emission guidelines for coal-fired power plants. In addition, he represented various climate "skeptical" arguments that climate scientists described as flawed. Via the official Twitter account of the science committee, he also lets false claims about climate issues be spread by Breitbart News , among others .

In 2017 he appeared at the 12th conference of the Heartland Institute , one of the central players in the organized climate change denial scene . There he announced, among other things, that in the future he wanted to step up action against state-funded climate research, which in his eyes was not real scientific research. At the same time, he promised his support for changes in the law, which should punish scientific journals that do not meet a standard that he personally specified. A few days later, at a hearing in Congress to which he had invited three well-known "climate skeptics", he said that climate researchers often do not work according to the scientific method and often ignore the fundamental principles of scientific work. At the same hearing, he denied Science , one of the most respected scientific journals in the world, from working carefully.

During his tenure in Congress, Smith received more than $ 700,000 in campaign and career grants from oil and gas companies , including over $ 100,000 in 2011–2012 alone.

Relationship to the media

Smith has been critical of the media on several occasions, which he accuses of being biased. Among other things, he criticized the fact that "the liberal media" did not give Donald Trump the attention he deserved. Instead of the media, people should get information directly from Trump, because this way could be the only way to learn "the unvarnished truth".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ house.gov: Congressman Lamar Smith's Biography. ( Memento of July 7, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Official biography, accessed February 11, 2010.
  2. ^ Lamar Smith: Campaign Finance / Money - Summary - Representative 2012 . OpenSecrets. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  3. ^ Lamar Smith (R-TX) US House | MAPLight.org - Money and Politics . MAPLight.org. Retrieved November 16, 2011.
  4. ^ Project Vote Smart - Representative Smith on H Amdt 509 - Prohibiting Federally Funded Abortion Services
  5. ^ Project Vote Smart - Representative Smith on S 403 - Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act
  6. ^ National Right to Life
  7. ^ Project Vote Smart - Representative Lamar S. Smith - Interest Group Ratings
  8. ^ Declan McCullagh: Congress readies broad new digital copyright bill. In: CNet . April 24, 2006.
  9. ^ Under voter pressure, members of Congress backpedal (hard) on SOPA, Ars Technica
  10. ^ Internet giants to protest controversial legislation with blackouts, St. Louis Today
  11. ↑ Lamar Smith , pirated copier , VICE magazine
  12. ↑ a b c Science Nerd Hopes to Unseat Congress' Most Detested Science Denier . In: Mother Jones , May 4, 2017. Retrieved May 7, 2017.
  13. ↑ Christine Gorman: Climate Change Denier Likely to Lead Congressional Science Committee. In: Scientific American . November 14, 2012. Retrieved December 28, 2013.
  14. ↑ The house science commitee's anti-science rampage . In: The New Yorker . September 14, 2016. Accessed March 30, 2017.
  15. ↑ Lamar Smith, climate scientist witch hunter . In: The Guardian . November 11, 2015. Accessed March 30, 2017.
  16. ↑ New analysis shows Lamar Smith's accusations on climate data are wrong . In: Ars Technica . January 4, 2017. Accessed March 30, 2017.
  17. ↑ Lamar Smith: Overheated rhetoric on climate change doesn't make for good policies . In: The Washington Post . May 20, 2013. Retrieved December 28, 2013.
  18. ↑ Michael Oppenheimer, Kevin Trenberth : Climate science tells us the alarm bells are ringing. In: The Washington Post. June 8, 2013. Retrieved December 28, 2013.
  19. ↑ The 9 Best Reactions to the House Science Committee's Breitbart Tweet . In: Scientific American . December 2, 2016. Accessed March 30, 2017.
  20. ^ Riley E. Dunlap, Peter J. Jacques: Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection . In: American Behavioral Scientist . tape 57 , no. 6 , 2013, p. 699-731 , doi : 10.1177 / 0002764213477096 .
  21. ↑ Jeffrey Mervis: Lamar Smith, unbound, lays out political strategy at climate doubters' conference . In: Science . March 25, 2017, doi : 10.1126 / science.aal0957 .
  22. ↑ Lamar Smith claims climate scientists not following scientific method . In: Ars Technica . March 29, 2017. Accessed March 30, 2017.
  23. ↑ Lamar Smith 2011–2012 on OpenSecrets.org. Retrieved December 28, 2013.
  24. ^ House science chairman: 'Get your news directly from the president.' . In: CNN . January 26, 2017. Accessed March 30, 2017.

Web links

Commons : Lamar S. Smith  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Smith, Lamar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Smith, Lamar Seeligson (full name); Smith, Lamar S.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American politician
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH San Antonio , Texas