New Jersey: Fourth District

Rep. Chris Smith (R)

Chris Smith (R) Elected 1980, 14th term up
Born:	03-04-1953, Rahway
Home:	Hamilton
Education:	Trenton St. Col., B.S. 1975
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Marie)
Professional Career:	Sales exec., family–owned sporting goods business, 1975–80; Exec. Dir., NJ Right to Life, 1976–78.
DC Office	2373 RHOB, 20515 202-225-3765 Fax: 202-225-7768 Website: chrissmith.house.gov
State Offices	Hamilton:609-585-7878; Whiting:732-350-2300;
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An invisible and not very well defined line lies across central New Jersey dividing North Jersey and South Jersey. North of the line people watch New York TV stations, eat hero sandwiches and root for the Yankees; south of the line they watch Philadelphia TV, eat hoagies and root for the Phillies. The state capital of Trenton lies south of the line, which passes east somewhere around Six Flags Great Adventure and Wild Safari in the Pine Barrens and heads southeast past Lakewood and Bricktown to the little village of Mantoloking on the Jersey Shore. But on both sides of the line there has also developed over the last two decades a stronger New Jersey identity. The big cities are, after all, far away, particularly when traffic is heavy, and the economy of central New Jersey has its own special character, with big pharmaceutical companies and Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base. New Jersey politics is also centered here: Trenton is the state capital and also the home of the first New Jersey-oriented talk radio station, started in 1989. Some parts of this area are old: Trenton has been a manufacturing center since the 19th century, with the Lenox and Boehm china factories, the old Roebling ironworks which produced parts for many of our great bridges (the reason for the sign, refurbished in 2005, that you see across the Delaware River, “Trenton Makes, the World Takes”). But much of this area is also spanking new, with growing subdivisions just west of the Shore and office buildings stretching north from Princeton. Even Trenton has had some growth: preservationists are eyeing its antique buildings and, long the only state capital without a hotel, it now has the Marriott Lafayette Yard Conference Hotel near the War Memorial.

The 4th Congressional District of New Jersey covers much of the central part of the state and the invisible line separating North Jersey and South Jersey. It stretches from the eastern part of Trenton to Mantoloking, Point Pleasant, Sea Girt and Spring Lake on the Shore. It includes the old colonial town of Burlington on the Delaware River and the new spacious subdivisions of Colts Neck just west of the Shore. It includes the Lakehurst air terminal where the zeppelin Hindenburg exploded in 1937 and where the Navy launched an airship in 2006. This is one part of America where population movement has been eastward, away from the old neighborhoods of Trenton and its close-in suburbs and toward the new subdivisions of Ocean County and Wall Township. Politically, it is a mixed area. The Trenton area has long been solidly Democratic, but the Pine Barrens and Shore have leaned Republican. A Republican trend and increasing turnout in Ocean and Monmouth Counties carried this Gore 2000 district for George W. Bush in 2004.

The congressman from the 4th District is Christopher Smith, a youthful-looking Republican first elected in 1980. Smith grew up in the Trenton area, worked in his family’s sporting goods business, and after graduating from college became executive director of the New Jersey Right to Life Committee in 1976. In 1980 he ran for the House in a more Trenton-centered 4th District and beat 26-year incumbent Frank Thompson, a convicted Abscam defendant. A fluke, it seemed, but Smith proceeded to beat several additional serious Democrats, winning more than 60% each time.

On abortion, Smith has worked to stop abortions in military hospitals and to reinstate the Reagan-era restrictions that would deny federal funds to family planning organizations that promote abortions abroad; George W. Bush restored the family-planning restrictions in an executive order in his first full day in office. Smith also has been a prime mover of legislation to ban partial-birth abortions.

He has fought not only Democrats but the House Republican leadership on the abortion issue. In July 2002 the bankruptcy bill, strongly backed by the leadership, came out of conference committee; the House had passed it 306–108 in March 2001. But it contained a provision, negotiated by Senator Charles Schumer and longtime abortion opponent Henry Hyde, providing that court judgments or fines could not be wiped out in bankruptcy: Schumer inserted this as a favor to abortion rights groups, after some abortion protesters declared bankruptcy to avoid paying fines. Smith and Joe Pitts led a group of abortion opponents and said they would vote against the bill unless the provision was removed. In November the leadership brought forward the rule to vote on the bill. Smith and Pitts stood their ground despite furious efforts by Whip Tom DeLay, and the rule went down 243–172, with 87 Republicans voting against. It was only the second rule defeated during Dennis Hastert’s first four years as speaker, and Hastert called Smith into his office to scold him in January 2003. Smith won a victory in 2004 when a provision stating that state and local governments could not force hospitals and care providers to perform abortions was put in the omnibus appropriation. His Unborn Child Pain Awareness Act, requiring doctors to inform pregnant women that some experts say fetus can feel pain after 20 weeks, finally got a floor vote in December 2006, the Republicans’ last month of control, but is unlikely to go anywhere in the Democratic House. Neither is his bill to revoke the FDA approval of the abortifacient RU-486—“baby pesticide,” to Smith, and “poison to the women themselves.” Smith has opposed funding embryonic stem-cell research. But he has been a champion on other stem-cell research. His bill to authorize $265 million for research and therapy with umbilical cord stem-cells and bone marrow transplant stem-cells passed the House 431–1 in May 2005.

Smith has brought his strong moral views and his indefatigable energy to work against abuses of human rights and human dignity abroad and at home. He has strongly criticized China for its forced sterilizations and abortions and its persecution of Christians and other religious minorities, and opposed normal trade relations with China. Smith has condemned Russia for barring entry of foreign Catholic priests and Saudis for treating foreign servants as slaves. He sponsored an embassy protection act before September 11. In 2000 he had the signal success of pushing to passage a bill combating sex trafficking around the world, including a provision opposed by the Clinton administration requiring yearly reports on each nation’s record; Clinton signed it anyway. In 2003 he succeeded in extending it to 2005. He got a third extension passed in 2005, with $361 million for prosecution of domestic trafficking and aid to young women and children victims. He cut short a trip to Africa for the signing in January 2006 and afterwards appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

As chairman of the Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations Subcommittee, he traveled to Sudan to talk with government leaders and visit the refugee camps in Darfur. Smith has also taken action on the subject: When he heard about Ukrainian girls being held against their will in brothels in Montenegro, he called the Montenegran prime minister, who ordered a raid on the operation. In July 2004 the House passed 323–45 his bill to bar increased aid to Vietnam unless the administration finds substantial progress toward releasing political prisoners and fostering religious freedom and democratic government and he sought to block WTO membership for Vietnam until it improves its human rights record. He held a hearing in February 2006 on the cooperation of Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco with Chinese government censorship and compared Chinese bloggers to Anne Frank; he sponsored a bill to regulate Internet companies abroad. He cosponsored the 2005 reauthorization that included a doubling of U.S. contributions to international peacekeeping, support of democracy in Haiti, permanent funding for Radio Free Asia and an Advance Democracy Act setting up a separate division in the State Department. He sponsored the 2005 law allowing U.S. participation in the Regional Emerging Diseases Intervention Center in Singapore. When Republicans lost their majority, he became ranking member of the renamed Africa and Global Health Subcommittee and promised to keep working on his causes. “Maybe if I hadn’t been in the minority for 14 years, I wouldn’t have that sense, but you just make it work.” 

In January 2001 Smith became chairman of the Veterans Committee and there pushed for policies opposed by the Republican leadership—which resulted in his losing the chairmanship in January 2005, two years short of the ordinary six-year limit. Over four years, Smith’s veterans bills increased VA disability payments by $2.5 billion, increased G.I. Bill of Rights spending 46%, authorized $1 billion in aid to homeless veterans and added $100 million in health care benefits for surviving spouses of veterans. Smith’s 2004 bill increased from 18 to 24 months the coverage of the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Act, set up a pilot program for recruitment of nurses and authorized a new research center of veterans with multi-trauma combat injuries. By no means were all of these programs authorized by Smith’s committee funded by the Appropriations Committee, and for three years Appropriations explicitly forbade spending on Smith’s four research centers to develop responses to chemical, biological and radiological attacks. In early 2003 Smith called for making veterans benefits an entitlement—mandatory spending that would not have to go through Appropriations. This the leadership opposed and there were threats he’d lose the chair. In 2003 he voted for the Republican budget resolution that included a $1.8 billion increase in veterans spending, but in July 2003 appropriators did not include the money; Smith opposed that but disappointed Democrats by not voting against the rule sending the measure to the floor. In 2004, Smith voted against the Republican resolution and for the Democratic budget resolution because the latter included more spending on veterans programs.

Over the last 30 years in both Republican and Democratic Houses the leadership of the majority party does not expect a committee chairman to vote against the party’s budget resolution. It did not help that Smith ranked eighth lowest among House Republicans in party-line voting (though that was still 81%). It seems that Smith did not expect a challenge for the chair. But Steve Buyer, the fourth ranking Republican on the committee, asked for an interview with the Republican Steering Committee, and on January 5, 2005, it voted to make him chairman. That decision was ratified by the Republican Conference January 6; Smith was off the committee altogether. New Jersey Republicans expressed dismay, and New Jersey Democrats and the leaders of just about every veterans group expressed outrage. His warning that veterans’ programs were being underfunded by $2.6 billion was proved true in June 2005, when Veterans Secretary Jim Nicholson announced that the agency had underestimated the number of return Iraq veterans by a factor of four and that the department needed another $2.6 billion. In November 2005, after Henry Hyde announced his retirement, Smith sought the chairmanship of the International Affairs Committee. He ranked behind the liberal Jim Leach in seniority, but ahead of Dan Burton, Elton Gallegly and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. “The budget proved we were right,” he said, referring to the veterans issue. “That should count for something. I never sought attention. I didn’t run out and do press conferences.” But the leadership was not persuaded and when it came time to pick the ranking minority member, it was Ros-Lehtinen who got the job. 

Smith tends to the needs of his district, which was particularly hard hit by the September 11 attacks: 57 residents of the 4th District were killed, and later in September, the anthrax letters sent to New York and Washington passed through the post office sorting facility in Hamilton, just east of Trenton. The facility was closed and some 800,000 pieces of mail delayed. Smith introduced a bill to waive financial penalties for people whose mail was delayed; the banking industry agreed to do that voluntarily. He voted to postpone the 2005 base closing round by two years and over 10 years worked to bring in $50 million for the Naval Air Engineering Station in Lakehurst; the station, which designs and builds aircraft carrier catapults and arresting gear, was spared when the Pentagon released its base closing recommendations in May 2005, though it was slated to lose 186 jobs. Smith’s devotion to principle and his reputation for tending to constituent problems have made him very popular in the 4th District. In 2004, Smith was reelected 67%-32%, and 66%-33% in the not very Republican year of 2006. 

Committees

• Foreign Affairs (2d of 23 R)
  Africa & Global Health (RMM); Western Hemisphere.

Presidential Vote

District Demographics (More Info)

• Cook Partisan Voting Index: R + 1
• Area size: 762 square miles
• Urban Population: 93.2%
• Rural Population: 6.8%
• Population 2000: 647,258
• Population 2005 (est): 689,202
• Median Income: $54,073
• Poverty Status: 6.6%
• Military Veterans: 13.3%
• Race/Ethnic Origin: 81.3% White; 7.5% Black; 2.3% Asian; 0.1% Native Am.; 0.0% Hawaiian; 1.1% Two+ races; 0.1% Other; 7.6% Hispanic Origin;
• Ancestry: 15.9% Italian%; 15.2% Irish%; 11.8% German%;
• Occupation: Blue collar 20.1%; White collar 65.3%; Gray collar 14.5%;