The congressman from the 21st District is Lamar Smith, a Republican first elected in 1986. He chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has long been among his party’s most influential figures on immigration. Read More

The congressman from the 21st District is Lamar Smith, a Republican first elected in 1986. He chairs the House Judiciary Committee and has long been among his party’s most influential figures on immigration.

Smith is from an old San Antonio and South Texas ranching family. Their Jim Wells County ranch has been in the family for four generations. Smith graduated from Texas Military Institute (now TMI, the Episcopal School of Texas), Yale University and Southern Methodist University’s law school. He worked as a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and as a lawyer in San Antonio. He was elected to the Texas House in 1980 and the Bexar County Commissioners Court in 1982. In 1986, when Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Loeffler ran for governor, Smith ran for the House seat. He won by beating two other San Antonio-based candidates in the primary and then winning the runoff 54%-46% against a religious conservative. His campaign was run by then little-known Texas political consultant Karl Rove, who became President George W. Bush’s top political advisor. Smith has been easily re-elected by wide margins.

In the House, Smith has a conservative voting record and joined the Tea Party Caucus when it was formed in 2010. Taking the helm of Judiciary in 2011, he vowed to press for tougher enforcement of immigration laws as an alternative to comprehensive reform, which he and many Republicans insist cannot include provisions providing illegal immigrants a potential path to citizenship. He is a strong believer in stronger action to stop illegal immigration and to reduce legal immigration. Smith irked Democrats in December 2010 when he called the DREAM Act—which would have opened up legal status to some children of illegal immigrants—an “American nightmare.”

He opposed Bush’s guest worker proposal in 2004 and bipartisan proposals to provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants living in the United States. The guest worker program, Smith said, “opens up every job in America” to low-wage competition. Like other House Republican leaders, he insisted that better border enforcement must be in place before new guest worker programs or legalization policies were established. Smith’s bill to split the Immigration and Naturalization Service into two agencies, one concentrating on law enforcement, the other on aid to immigrants, was passed as part of the homeland security bill in 2002. He drew attention in 2005 when one of his aides misdialed a fax number while intending to send a confidential memo to Rove at the White House, causing it to fall into Democratic hands. In the memo, Smith wrote that “liberals can easily and accurately be painted as opposing enforcement.”

In the aftermath of a controversial law cracking down on illegal immigration in Arizona in 2010, Smith became a leading House Republican voice in support of the law, which allowed police to demand proof of citizenship from people stopped or questioned by police for other reasons. He criticized the Obama administration for suing to stop enforcement of the Arizona law. When President Barack Obama blamed Republicans for blocking comprehensive immigration reform in July 2010, Smith retorted that workplace enforcement of immigration laws under the president was in a free fall. He also stepped into the controversy stirred by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s proposal to modify the 14th Amendment, which has formed the legal basis for granting citizenship to people born on U.S. soil. Smith argued that changing a constitutional amendment would be too difficult, and that the same end could be achieved by a statutory reinterpretation of the amendment by Congress to disallow citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants.

Despite deep partisan conflicts on the committee on immigration and other issues, Smith gets along with Democrats better than do many in his party, and in recent years, found common ground on bills to strengthen cyber security and intellectual property enforcement. Smith has worked closely with ranking Judiciary Democrat John Conyers of Michigan on patent reform issues. In April 2009, Smith and Conyers co-sponsored a bill to strengthen patent quality and to discourage frivolous lawsuits. He and Conyers also agreed with proposed structural changes made by the Patent and Trademark Office aimed at improving review quality and employee morale for an agency dealing with a heavy backlog of patent applications. Their bill also gave the PTO fee-setting authority on patents, and they sought a supplemental appropriation to hire more patent examiners. The measure did not become law in the 111th Congress (2009-10), so Smith moved a new version through the committee in April 2011.

On other issues, Smith parted with Conyers and held the Republican Party line. He opposed a committee proposal that eliminated mandatory minimum prison sentences for crack cocaine use. A modified version of the bill was eventually signed into law, making crack sentencing closer to the lighter penalties enforced for powder cocaine use. Smith also sharply criticized a Democratic proposal in February 2010 to impose criminal penalties of up to 20 years in jail for certain interrogation techniques in terrorism investigations. Smith in June 2009 announced the formation of a Media Fairness Caucus devoted to exposing what he considers the news media’s liberal bias. During 2010, he spoke on the House floor about the issue 47 times.

In earlier years on the committee, Smith was chairman of what was then the Crime Subcommittee, where he focused on cyber crime and high technology issues. He also worked on bipartisan changes to the Freedom of Information Act to make it easier and faster for the public to obtain government information. Smith’s bill creating a 20-year sentence for fraudulently obtaining consumer and business phone records and distributing them over the Internet became law in 2007. Smith created a new Judiciary subcommittee on intellectual property and the Internet in 2011 and vowed to work on curbing online child pornography.