From Bloody Mary to Beetlejuice, everyone knows that saying a ghost’s name three times will summon them. Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) is testing this superstition with one of the most shameful ghosts of American history: Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose rabid anti-Communist witch hunts made his name synonymous with the abuse of political power in the service of paranoid conspiracy theories.
In a letter defending his right to subpoena state attorneys general’s (AGs) emails, Smith has found a third McCarthy-era court case to cite. While PoliticoPRO reports on this latest volley in the back-and-forth, they don’t mention Smith’s reliance on House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) cases to justify his subpoenas.
While Smith’s past letters have invoked the cases of Barenblatt v US and Watkin v US, this one uses Wilkinson v US to argue the legality of his congressional subpoena.
Smith says that he has jurisdictional rights to subpoena because his committee oversees federal science funding. If the investigations are chilling research, the committee would need to create new legislation to redistribute funding to compensate, Smith claims. How emails between the AGs and NGOs would prove or disprove that other scientists aren’t going to receive funding is not explained.
In a similar vein, Smith’s letter claims that he’s not usurping state rights and violating the Tenth Amendment because he’s not trying to interfere with the AGs investigations. He is merely trying to determine what effects these investigations have on research. Again, how these confidential communications would be useful in determining what some nebulous and unnamed scientists feel may or may not be chilling their work is not explained.
The letter ends by addressing the First Amendment concerns that New York AG Eric Schneiderman raised -- that Smith is punishing NGOs for exercising their right to petition the government. Smith doesn’t actually rebut that assertion directly, but instead says that it’s the responsibility of those NGOs to defend their First Amendment rights. Why this doesn’t also apply Smith’s already-ironic claim to be defending ExxonMobil’s First Amendment rights is, yet again, not explained.
Three claims, but no explanations. Three citations of McCarthy, but no media mention of Smith’s attempts to conjure up the Ghost of Witch Hunts Past.
Beetlejuice lore aside, someone might actually want to look into congressional exorcisms. Between this and his shameful NOAA inquisition, it certainly seems like Smith is possessed by McCarthy’s paranoid and partisan witch-hunting spirit.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories:
China and US to ratify landmark Paris climate deal ahead of G20 summit, sources reveal | China and the US account for about 38 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions
Changing opinions on climate change, from a CNN Meteorologist - With each year, with each major disaster, it becomes harder to be a skeptic of man-made climate change -- and that is why I am not one.
Climate scientists write another letter warning of unfolding crisis for Turnbull to ignore | More than 150 leading climate scientists at universities and government agencies ask for cuts to coal exports, saying: ‘There is no Planet B’
With new climate legislation, Gov. Brown gets even with the oil industry - Brown lauded the Assembly for “rejecting the brazen deception of the oil lobby and their [Donald] Trump-inspired allies who deny science and fight every reasonable effort to curb global warming.”