Congress isn’t exactly America’s favorite institution right now. With a measly 17 percent approval rating according to a Gallup poll released last month, the legislative body’s only real bipartisan achievement is its ability to unite both sides of the aisle in mutual disdain.
Yet Congress is merely a sum its parts, and some of those parts are worse than others.
Meet Representative Lamar Smith, R – Texas, of Texas’s 21st congressional district.
Now, I don’t usually write columns to go after one particular politician or another, but sometimes a Congressman is involved in so many troubling pieces of legislation that I’d feel irresponsible if I didn’t opine about it.
Smith seemed to have been a relatively unknown politician outside of his district before late last year – that is before he introduced a bill that would enrage millions of Internet users around the country: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).
SOPA has already been extensively covered by those in this newspaper and others across the country, and it’s provisions received a resounding “no” from many of this country’s citizens when they joined an online protest against the bill.
When it comes to Internet-related bills, Smith is an archvillain to those who understand and use the technology most. Along with SOPA, Smith also introduced another Internet-related bill last year called the Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act (PCIP). Of course, at first glance, it’s difficult to imagine who would oppose such a bill. However, it wasn’t the bill’s goals that instigated protest, it was the methods for achieving those goals.
PCIP would have mandated that Internet service providers to keep records of their users’ information for 18 months. That includes Internet activity, names, bank accounts, IP addresses and credit card numbers, leaving people’s information at risk to security breaches and “treating every Internet user like a criminal,” in the words of Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston.
Yet, despite the backlash against these bills, Smith’s crusade for intellectual property rights has continued.
Most recently, he has introduced the Intellectual Property Attache Act, which would create a new bureaucracy in the Department of Commerce to influence other nation’s laws on intellectual property. So much for the notion of smaller government.
Still, it isn’t only in the digital realm that Smith has earned my disaffection.
Smith is Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which is charged with overseeing the the administration of justice in federal courts.
Earlier this month, that same committee, in response to stories in the New York Times detailing President Obama’s secret “kill list” and the United States’ role with the Stuxnet virus, flirted with the idea of expanding the Espionage Act of 1917 to journalists who publish leaked information.
As a columnist, such a suggestion is appalling to me. It’s the kind of thinking that leads to an authoritarian state and limits what civilians know about their government.
That’s a running theme with everything I’ve discussed in this article.
SOPA’s censoring provisions were deemed by many, including Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, as an attack on the freedom of speech. PCIP clearly threatened the average citizen’s right to privacy, a right that has been chipped away frequently in the past decade. The threatened expansion of the Espionage Act showed, at the very least, a disrespect for the freedom of the press.
And in each one of these cases there is a constant repeating variable, and that is Rep. Smith.
However, despite being associated with these actions, Smith won the Republican nomination for his district, essentially ensuring his reelection in November in the eyes of many.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean the fight is over.
Smith has shown himself to be a threat to many important civil liberties and to the Internet in general, and I hope this article demonstrates that to those from or with family from Texas’ 21st district.
It’s a long time between now and November.
David Scheuermann is a 20-year-old mass communication and computer science junior from Kenner. Follow him on Twitter at @TDR_dscheu.
 
____ Contact David Scheuermann at dscheuermann@lsureveille.com