An interview with Chris Smith

This is the second in a series of in-person, in-depth New Jersey Globe interviews with New Jersey’s 14 members of Congress. The interviews will be published as-is, with editing for length and clarity.

This week, the Globe spoke with Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester), a 22-term Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights, & International Organizations. The Globe sat down with Smith to discuss his long career in Congress, the human rights battles he’s currently waging, his views on abortion and renewable energy, and more.

Previous interviews: Rep. Andy Kim

New Jersey Globe: You have been in Congress longer than almost anyone else. You would be Dean of the House if not for an alphabetical quirk. What has changed the most in the 43 years that you’ve been here?

Chris Smith: I guess it’s the lack of civility in debate and in relations. And the ever-present hijacking of legislation and ideas, which has been around, but it seems to have gotten worse. I’ve had most of my things ripped off at one time or another; I find it appalling. You have an idea and you’re pushing it? I’ll be your co-sponsor. I’m not going to become the sponsor. But it’s the lack of civility – and that’s on both sides of the aisle. There’s no doubt about that.

We’re seeing that with Israel and the hate that is emanating there – I just can’t believe that. We’re seeing it in the field, too, with all the picketers who want Israel to be destroyed and Jews to be killed, murdered, raped. It was never like that. Israel always had a very special place in the hearts and minds of members of Congress. That has now been seriously threatened. I do think that J Street and some of the other initiatives over the years, which were the counter to AIPAC, have opened up a space for that. Some of these mega-donors who are very antisemitic have opened up that space even further. From the moment I got to this place, I’ve been working on combating antisemitism. My second speech was on antisemitism; my first was on POW/MIAs.

I get along very well with Steny Hoyer. [Hoyer, the former House Majority Leader, and Smith both joined the House in 1981, though Smith has a five-month seniority advantage.] We do collaborate on a lot of things, particularly as it relates to antisemitism and combating it. But [the debate on Israel] has changed. I didn’t see that coming, the way that maybe some people did. We know that there was maybe a rising tide of antisemitic belief. That’s a major change in Congress and among the elites. I don’t think it’s there among average people. I find, in my own district – every one of the districts I’ve had has been pro-Israel. Long before I had Lakewood, it was very pro-Israel. I was working on antisemitism for 20 years before Lakewood was spliced into the district, and that is very Orthodox Jewish. They were happy to hear that I was coming into the district.

So that’s a major issue, lack of civility. It used to be, you’d look people in the eyes, and their word was their bond. And now? People are doing end runs. They talk about this being a swamp here; I think that’s an insult, because there are a lot of good members here that strive to serve their constituencies, but there are some who take it in the wrong direction.

How would you want to see Congress get out of this space that it’s in?

Respect. One word. Respect each other. You disagree on something – and I disagree with people all the time, that’s what this place is all about. It’s a marketplace of ideas. Disagree, but do it civilly. Make your arguments. It is a majority-wins type of game here. If you lose, come back to fight another day. I think that’s what we need to go back to – not, if you lose, you have a scorched-earth policy, or you say things that are very objectionable. We see it in campaigns, too, where the truth is the first casualty of many campaigns these days. I’ve had that happen with me repeatedly, where stuff has been sent out which is demonstrably false.

Truth should not be a casualty of any of this. You should tell the truth. If you lose, you lose. If you win, you win. Period.

As you look ahead at the 2024 election, both your own election and the broader elections that will be happening – Bob Menendez, Joe Biden versus Donald Trump – are you worried about that same dynamic coming into play again?

It always does. But I run my campaigns. I don’t run the top of the ticket. They battle it out and they do their best; I can be supportive, and I have been of our candidates in the past, but that’s their focus. You’re responsible for your own race. While I endorse people and get endorsed, at the end of the day, people are not persuaded largely by endorsements.

The day after my ’82 win – and that was a huge come-from-behind win against the President of the New Jersey State Senate, Joseph Merlino – Tony Wilson from the Trentonian and Jim Goodman from the Trenton Times, the two biggest reporters in what was primarily a Trenton-based district, said that ’84 will be the real test, with Bill Bradley at the top of the ticket. It was like, there’s no way, when that tsunami of Bradley support comes in, that I would survive. A Trenton Times reporter, at the Chamber of Commerce dinner one year, was so dismissive of me, he goes, ‘There’s no way you’re going to win. I’ll bet you dinner.’ So I bet him dinner. And I won, but I never got the dinner. The point was, when you look at the ticket-splitters, Bradley carried the district very decisively, and so did I. We had a hundred thousand or so ticket-splitters in one congressional district, which is unprecedented. I ran my race, I kept my focus on my race, and he ran his.

With the understanding that you’ll keep your own race as your focus, are you ready to make an endorsement in the 2024 Senate race or the presidential race?

Not yet. I probably will, but right now, I’m just worried about policy. That’s my focus.

Which is what I want to ask about next. Your biggest focus in Congress has been human rights abuses. Every time I speak to you in the hallways, that’s what we end up talking about.

That’s because I usually have a hearing that day. [I’ve focused on] every aspect of human rights, humanitarianism, democracy. I’ve had a couple of State Department bills become law, which is very, very hard to do. One of them, we passed in the House after we got hit in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi in 1998. I held the hearings about what went wrong. Al Qaeda was going transnational. It turned out, we needed to upgrade our embassies, setbacks, mylar in the windows – all this stuff to save lives. I did a bill called the Embassy Security Act, and it passed the House, but the Senate wouldn’t take it up. So I added it to the appropriations bill in its entirety. And it became law. We actually changed the name, because we were running into such problems; we called it the Admiral James Nance and Meg Donovan Foreign Relations Act of 2001, because we were getting pushback, so we named it after two good staffers – not for them, but for their former bosses. Both had passed away. [Nance had been an aide to Senator Jesse Helms, while Donovan was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton White House.]

What are the equivalents of those types of bills that are your biggest priorities for the future? What do you really want to get through?

I’ve introduced about 40 bills this year. One has passed, and two more will pass shortly in the House. The complete reauthorization of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, which I wrote in the year 2000. I’ve done a number of iterations of it that have become law, five in total. This will be the sixth. But we’ve got a lot of brand-new provisions in it that are really great. A lot of emphasis on prevention – having school curricula that make our young people situationally aware. I got that passed in the last iteration. I named it after Frederick Douglass, it was a great program. Then Covid hit, and HHS kind of dropped the ball and barely did anything. I went to all the meetings, everyone’s on the same page, and they just didn’t get it done. We want our young people – elementary and secondary, age-appropriate in terms of the curriculum – to know what to look out for [with regards to human trafficking]. Training will make them situationally aware, for either them or their friends to say, ‘Wait a minute. This guy is not to be trusted.’ That’s very heavily in the bill.

I’ve also been pushing since 2010 the idea of making airlines situationally aware – you get eyes and ears as they fly, the flight attendants and the pilots – and hotels and motels. We have a provision in there that gives them preference for government purchases when they do training. Nobody buys more hotels or convention spaces than the U.S. government. Nobody. We’re the biggest procurer of those services; well, they get preference, in this bill, if they have situational training for their staff. And it will work. You name the hotel, I’ve had them before my subcommittee. And they’re doing some good things. Hyatt’s done a great job, and Marriott. We just need to grow it so that bringing three little kids, or a woman who looks like she doesn’t want to be there, or three women to be sold – that the front desk and everyone else knows what to look out for. Call law enforcement, let them handle it.

We have another bill that came out of a family in Robbinsville; their daughter, Samantha Josephson, was killed at the University of South Carolina by a guy who purported to be an Uber driver. Brutally killed – this guy should never get out of prison. From that, we did some checking, and found that Uber and Lyft have a serious problem with rape, assaults, other kinds of problems. They hang out, some of these fake as well as real Uber drivers, at college campuses, all ready to take that young girl, who might be alone or even with a friend who maybe had too much to drink, and abuse her. We introduced a bill to make it much more transparent that this is your ride, you won’t get into a false car, and now there’s a record so that that guy in the driver’s seat might be less likely to commit a crime against you. It’s really important, because so many high school and college kids are using Uber and Lyft. And it’s not safe in that back seat at all.

I did a really good, multifaceted bill and got it passed in the House, and the Senate killed it. So I got it passed again – the Senate killed it. Last year, the last provision in it was for a Government Accountability Office study on what kind of background checks they do on these guys, how serious is it, looking at assaults and the like, and how many assaults there are. GAO’s been tasked with that; it did pass, it became law. We’re waiting for that study any day now. We’re going to rewrite the bill if the evidence suggests we need to, and we’re going to say, ‘Look, we’ve got a problem here.’

Next year, we’re going to try to get the bill through, as soon as we get the GAO study. Uber – and Lyft too, but Uber especially – I had statements that were read during the debate of their support. We really worked to try to find a consensus that we could live with, but still not compromise on the goal. And they reneged on it, and went to the Senate and said, ‘We don’t like the bill.’ I said, what? I mean, I had them here, brought them back in, and they said, ‘Well, we never thought it would get to the point of passing the House.’ So you endorse it knowing that you don’t think it’s going to pass the House? And the amount of money they put into campaigns is ridiculous.

Your Veterans Affairs Committee chairmanship was a little while ago. Chairman McCaul on the Foreign Affairs Committee is term-limited from his chairmanship next year –

I’m not going to comment.

Are you interested in becoming a chairman in Congress again?

Of course.

Shifting to another policy realm, another long-time focus of yours is abortion. We’ve been in a different America for the last year and a half, in the post-Roe v. Wade world. What do you see as the path forward here? What do you think Congress should do, what do you think America should do in this post-Roe reality?

I think we need a national conversation on abortion. I wrote an op-ed about that right after Dobbs. The chorus of people who are in denial, a culture of denial, about the existence and the value of an unborn child – there needs to be a reintroduction that this is who this child is. There’s no doubt in my mind that ultrasound has caused so many people to realize it is a baby. Before ultrasound – I’ve been in the movement for a lot of years – it was very primitive. Now, you get a 3D image of that baby and a video to take home. There’s no doubt that it’s a baby.

My wife and I have been in the pro-life movement for 50 years. I got involved in 1972. And one of the most important parts of the movement has been, throughout all those years, pregnancy care centers. The lifesaving work they do is astonishing. They do ultrasounds there. I know Josh Gottheimer and Frank Pallone are looking to trash them and smear them, and I find that appalling. Planned Parenthood doesn’t like them because they take away their business. These pregnancy care centers are honest and honorable. Some of the women who run them are post-abortive; they had abortions, and never want another woman to go through what they went through. I believe there’s two victims in every abortion. The obvious is the child who just had his head taken off. The other is the mother. And she is without a doubt a co-victim that needs love and compassion. Love them both – that’s our argument.

So the pro-life movement, as we go through an accelerated attack on the unborn by the so-called pro-choice crowd – we’re going to double down on asserting defense for the unborn child. The most immediate concern is public funding for abortion. Every year, we have to argue and debate to preserve the Hyde Amendment and my amendment, the Smith Amendment, on the Federal Employees’ Health Benefits program; they’re under assault to coerce and force every taxpayer to pay for every abortion. That’s the fight right now, with the HHS bill and all the others. That’s our number one concern that we are trying to address.

Since the Dobbs decision came down, there have been many opportunities – not in New Jersey, but in other states – where abortion has been directly on the ballot. In most of those cases, maybe all of those cases, the pro-abortion side has won. How do you square that against your views?

We’ll get through that. The advertising and the amount of money that has poured into those referendums – it eclipses what the pro-life side has done. They have lied, as they did in the Ohio case, where they kept saying that ectopic pregnancies would be affected. It was a lie; the law didn’t do that. None of us have ever said anything other than, there’s no doubt that ectopic pregnancies have to be removed. Period. But they threw that in there and confused so many people. They’re very good at it. It gets back to what I said before about disinformation, smearing, and the lack of civility – the lack of truth is above all. The abortion movement has done this throughout all these years. They deny the existence of the unborn child, they trivialize the baby’s very existence. It’s a culture of denial, and it’s also a culture of death.

I think, as that story gets out more and more – the Civil Rights Movement, every other movement has always had setbacks. We’re going to have setbacks. But we’re going to persevere, because every child is of infinite value, as is their mother.

Another policy realm that I wanted to talk about is offshore wind. That was another pretty big victory for you recently, with Ørsted scuttling its projects. You represent a coastal district that, in the event of climate change, rising seas, and more extreme weather events, is going to get slammed. It got slammed by Sandy –

And it got slammed by Hurricane Donna when I was a newspaper boy for the Perth Amboy Evening News back in the early ’60s. It was a major storm. And we’ve had others. We do get a lot of them. We’ve always had them.

Right, but I think the evidence points towards them increasing, and that becoming a bigger threat.

Maybe. But I think what the evidence points to is, you don’t do something that is unscientific, and nobody knows what impact those Chrysler Building-sized turbines are going to have. We’re talking about 3,400 of them, and going further than that after 2035, so they’re not done. A Category 3 hurricane will topple at least half of them. There’s one study in 2012 that said that. And that’s because those propellers are so big, you can’t tether them enough during a big storm – they’re going to go down. I asked the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management about that. The point for Biden on all of this wind energy is BOEM. The woman came and testified, I invited myself, and I asked her about that.

I also asked her about the sonar and the radar, which I think is one of the biggest issues of all. It totally disrupts radar. So we’re going to have airliners, Piper Cubs, helicopters, Air Force – we’ve got an Air Force base at McGuire. I talked to them and said, you need to be going up the chain of command and looking to the military, the people that deal with this. What’s going to happen to this base when you can’t do maneuvering over large sections of it because you’re getting false images? We might not even see a cruise missile coming, and that’s not an exaggeration at all.

We don’t know what they’ll do to the climate – all that spinning, what’s that going to do to moisture, water? Nobody has a clue. Which is why I asked the GAO to study all of it. That will come out soon, I hope, and if they do an honest job – and I think they will. If they get it wrong, they get it wrong, but I do think they’ll make our case based on the science.

So, offshore wind has a lot of reasons why you think it’s problematic. What would you advocate for instead, in this realm of renewable energy and reducing emissions?

I have always believed in CAFE [corporate average fuel economy standards], in better mileage per car and all of that. We’ve made some real strides – I’ve always voted for that, I’ve always believed that’s one way of increasing efficiency. I do believe mass transit is a good answer for some – not a whole lot, but for a portion of the population, particularly for those commuting every day to New York. Sitting in traffic with the engine running, that’s not necessarily a good thing for the environment. And reasonable efforts need to be taken. In terms of greenhouse gasses, there are technologies that are being worked on that would clean up and take the ambient air, suck it out and get these carbon emissions reduced. We need to do more on that.

I do believe that responsible drilling is an answer. To arbitrarily tell people they have to have an electric vehicle to mitigate global warming is irresponsible. I’ll give you some reasons for that. I had my second hearing on cobalt – around 35,000 kids, 200,000 adults, all in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are mining this and getting very sick and dying, and China runs the mines. The DR Congolese leadership, which is corrupt, is getting paid very, very handsomely by the Chinese Communist Party to just give it all to them. Every bit of cobalt leaves unrefined, goes to China, gets refined and processed, and then it comes back as our EV engines, which rely heavily on cobalt. Supply chains matter a lot. It’s all about trafficking.

If you get a supply chain that is clear of forced labor, then the argument of ‘are EVs good or not’ is the question alone that needs to be considered. But for our governor and Gavin Newsom and others to be saying, by 2035, there’s no more combustible engines that can be sold here – really? Are you kidding? That’s only 12 years away. And the supply chain – they don’t address it. Why don’t they address it? I have a bill that would begin that conversation about human rights violations and supply chains for EVs. It does just what we did with the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, and I was one of the architects of that law, that says that anything that comes out of Xinjiang, the presumption is was made with forced labor. This bill follows that same idea of a presumption [for the DR Congo] – but they can rebut it. If they can show that the supply chain is clean, they come in. They can’t? We don’t allow them to be admissible to the United States of America. I’m going to push so hard for this, because I’ve met so many people who are bearing witness to this truth. It’s outrageous.

You’ve had this long, long career in Congress. You have all these accomplishments. Looking forward, not just on a policy level but on a broader level, where do you place yourself in a Congress and a Republican Party that’s getting more volatile?

I keep my focus on the weakest and most vulnerable: trafficking victims, unborn children, someone who’s got AIDS, somebody who has Lyme Disease, veterans who have PTSD. For me, it’s always about where we can make the greatest difference as a body of lawmakers: with people who are at the most risk. That’s why, at home, we work casework like I don’t think anyone else does. We push so hard when somebody calls us – we’ve had what, 95,000 individual cases? More than that now. I do a lot of it myself; I can’t do them all, but I’ve got a great staff.