Lamar Smith, Committee on Science, Space and Technology, seems to think science is a scam.

Lamar Smith, Committee on Science, Space and Technology, seems to think science is a scam.

Early this year, House Republicans decided to give some of its committee chairpersons the same kind of unilateral subpoena power once wielded by Rep. Darrell Issa of the House Oversight Committee on Government Reform. In practice that means these committee chairs can issue subpoenas without consulting with the top Democrats on their panels, which had long been the previous practice. This opens the door to ridiculous fishing expeditions.

One chairperson with this new power is Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, who heads the Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Smith is one of the more than half of House Republicans who reject climate science. David Roberts at Vox points out in a scathing assessment that the committee is engaged in "open-ended, Orwellian attempts to intimidate some of the nation's leading scientists and scientific institutions":



The science committee's modus operandi is similar to the Benghazi committee's—sweeping, catchall investigations, with no specific allegations of wrongdoing or clear rationale, searching through private documents for out-of-context bits and pieces to leak to the press, hoping to gain short-term political advantage—but it stands to do more lasting long-term damage. In both cases, the investigations have continued long after all questions have been answered. (There were half a dozen probes into Benghazi before this one.) In both cases, the chair has drifted from inquiry to inquisition. But with Benghazi, the only threat is to the reputation of Hillary Clinton, who has the resources to defend herself. With the science committee, it is working scientists being intimidated, who often do not have the resources to defend themselves, and the threat is to the integrity of the scientific process in the US. It won't take much for scientists to get the message that research into politically contested topics is more hassle than it's worth.

One of Smith's targets, as Katherine Bagley at InsideClimate News has reported , is Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason University in Virginia, where he is chief of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES). He is the lead signatory of a letter signed by 20 scientists calling for the Obama administration to see if fossil fuel companies can be prosecuted under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) for defrauding the public about climate change. The letter was sparked by revelations in a six-part investigation by InsideClimate News. The committee has let Shukla know it will soon be looking into purported misuse of federal funds by IGES for partisan purposes.

That's not all, as you can read below.