I’ve written about Rep. Lamar Smith’s (R-TX) bad advice about Americans getting all their information from President Trump here. I’m mildly happy to see Science reporting Rep. Smith is retiring:
The controversial chairperson of the science committee in the U.S. House of Representatives announced today that he will not seek re-election to Congress next fall. The pending departure of Representative Lamar Smith (R–TX) could give the U.S. scientific community a chance to recalibrate a rocky 5-year relationship with a key congressional committee.
The 69-year-old Smith, who was first elected to Congress in 1986, is in the middle of his third 2-year stint as chairman of the science committee. House rules require members to step down as chairperson after 6 years, so Smith was already a lame duck.
But his departure could be more than simply a changing of the Republican guard. Smith, trained as a lawyer, has fought acrimonious battles with scientists over peer review, climate change, and the role of the federal government in supporting basic research since becoming chairperson in January 2013. He has clashed repeatedly with senior officials at the National Science Foundation, which he has accused of wasting tax dollars on frivolous research, and at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which he believes has hampered economic development through overregulation.
“Chairman Smith’s climate denial and investigations have created consternation in the scientific community and relations have deteriorated while he’s been chair,” one longtime observer says. “But he has not been fundamentally hostile to the scientific or academic enterprise. In an increasingly ideological and polarized Congress, it’s not clear whether his successor will be less controversial.”
The Union of Concerned Scientists, which has been one of Smith’s leading critics over the years, says his departure “offers Congress and the science community a chance for a fresh start.” The science committee “became a venue for partisan conflict and political interference in science” during his tenure, says Andrew Rosenberg, who heads the union’s center for science and democracy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In light of his terrible advice concerning President Trump as the fount of all knowledge, this is a bit of an appalling revelation:
Smith’s letter announcing his decision notes that he has “been able to shape policy involving ethics, immigration, crime, intellectual property, space, energy, the environment, the budget, and high tech” as chairperson of the ethics, judiciary, and science committees.” But the 16-term legislator is vague about exactly why he’s retiring, saying only that “for several reasons, this seems like a good time.”
Given his flawed idea of government’s role in society, the idea that he chaired a committee on ethics leaves me feeling mildly ill.
