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Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said today that the Senate immigration bill is even worse than feared, since it legalizes illegals' relatives and even those previously deported: "It's hard to believe, but the Senate immigration bill is worse than we thought. Despite assurances, the border is not secured before almost everyone in the country illegally is given amnesty. The bill guarantees there will be a rush across the border to take advantage of massive amnesty." Rep. Smith says the Senate immigration bill shreds current immigration laws: "And the Senate proposal offers amnesty to far more illegal immigrants than we thought. In...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, told President Obama Thursday he’d like to interview seven current and former administration officials who may know something about a spate of national security leaks. The request follows suggestions by lawmakers a day earlier that they’re interested in potentially pursuing a congressional investigation into the leaks, on top of the Department of Justice-led probe. “Concern about these leaks knows no party line. When national security secrets leak and become public knowledge, our people and our national interests are jeopardized. And when our enemies know our secrets, American lives are threatened,” Smith said in...

With a scathing roll call of Eric Holder's sins, Lamar Smith paves the way for the attorney general's upcoming appearance before his committee. The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee launched a scathing attack on the Department of Justice today with a report outlining how Attorney General Eric Holder’s agency is “ignoring the Constitution to impose a partisan agenda.” “The pattern of pushing partisan ideology rather than neutrally enforcing the law began nearly as soon as the Administration took office and has continued unabated since,” the report from Rep. Lamar Smith states. The Texas Republican said that under the Obama...

Congressional support for controversial online piracy legislation eroded dramatically on Wednesday in the face of an unprecedented online protest supported by tech titans such as Google, Wikipedia and Facebook. Several key senators withdrew their support from the Senate's Protect IP Act (PIPA), including Tea Party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), an elected member of his party's leadership. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who leads the Senate GOP's campaign team, said the legislation should be put on hold, while Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a sponsor and the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, retreated from the...

For all the talk from some that SOPA was "dead," it appears it's alive and well and getting ready for its big re-entrance. Lamar Smith has just sent out a press release saying that he intends to resume the markup in February...

SOPA is only one reason I ask this. Maybe it's just me, but it seems like I see Lamar Smith coming up more and more, and not in a good way. For those who may have forgotten, here is what Trent Lott said: "We don't need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples," Lott said in an interview. "As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them." How successful do you think they've been?

In a move the technology sector will surely see as a victory, a controversial antipiracy bill being debated in Congress will no longer include a provision that would require ISPs to block access to overseas Web sites accused of piracy. Rep. Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), one of the biggest backers of the Stop Online Piracy Act, today said he plans to remove the Domain Name System or DNS-blocking provision. "After consultation with industry groups across the country," Smith said in a statement released by his office, "I feel we should remove DNS-blocking from the Stop Online Piracy Act so that...

I already wrote a big post about yesterday's SOPA markup day one. While we're moving forward on day two, I wanted to call out one key point that was really made clear by an amendment offered by Rep. Jared Polis late in the day yesterday, which hasn't received nearly enough attention. As you may recall, with the "manager's amendment" version of SOPA (i.e., SOPA 2.0), the "notice-and-shut off funding" section of the private right of action in Section 103 was removed. This was good, because we've seen how the notice-and-takedown provision of the DMCA has been widely abused. However, what...

Eight hours into Thursday’s marathon hearing on the controversial “Stop Online Piracy Act” not a single amendment proposed by the bill’s critics in Congress had been passed. In fact, at the time of this posting, all of the amendments introduced by House lawmakers designed to improve the legislation for critics have so far been voted down by a core of SOPA-supporters in the House Judiciary Committee, moving the controversial bill closer toward passage. . . Another amendment that was voted down was proposed by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). It would have allowed ISPs to refuse takedown notices that would interfere...

House Republicans are moving to subpoena a list of all immigrants whom the Obama administration has flagged under its secure communities program but failed to arrest for deportation, after the Homeland Security Department missed a congressionally imposed deadline to produce the information this week. Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, said he wants the data so he can see who is among the 300,000 people the administration has deemed too low a priority to detain under new deportation guidelines. He has scheduled a meeting for Wednesday for the immigration subcommittee to vote to authorize the subpoena. “Why would DHS...

Legislation has been introduced in Congress to stop President Obama from further implementing a “backdoor amnesty” program that has already suspended the deportation of thousands of illegal immigrants, including those with criminal convictions. The president’s stealth amnesty plan was first exposed last year after internal Homeland Security documents were obtained by the media. The first is a now-famous (memo) outlining a secret backup plan to grant illegal immigrants amnesty in case Congress doesn’t pass legislation to do it. Devised by high-ranking officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the plan calls for “meaningful immigration reform absent legislative action” and...

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers' activities for one year--in case police want to review them in the future--under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today. The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall's elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET. A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers' names, addresses,...

Bill would freeze Obama administration's power to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants By Jordy Yager - 06/25/11 05:05 PM ET The Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is crafting a bill that would temporarily freeze the Obama administration’s power to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants. The measure is in response to a memo issued by the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last week that approved a broader breadth of discretion for agency officials when considering whether to deport someone through the Secure Communities program. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who is sponsoring the legislation, blasted the memo. He...

One way to judge the likely effectiveness of Chairman Lamar Smith's national mandatory E-Verify bill is the panic it has caused among the nation's biggest promoters of illegal immigration. They attack Rep. Smith's bill because they say it will take the incomes away from large swaths of America's illegal population. Well, I guess that's the point isn't it, because those incomes will now go to unemployed American citizens and legal immigrants who already are here. The big pro-amnesty coalition called Reform Immigration FOR America screamed in its mass email: Mass firings, mass deportations

One of the central points of focus for the illegal immigration debate recently has been the use by employers of the federal government’s E-Verify system for checking the immigration status of potential or existing employees. Now Lamar Smith, the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has introduced a bill, H.R. 2164, which purports to mandate E-Verify use for all American employers. The merits of this legislation are pretty obvious, and have been cited by immigration enforcement and reform groups like FAIR in support of Smith’s bill. Getting corporations and businesses that have resisted the implementation of E-Verify for years to...

History is threatening to re peat itself. Twenty-five years ago, Congress passed the Simpson-Mazzoli Act (better known among conservatives as the 1986 illegal-alien amnesty), which gave a path to citizenship to illegal aliens already here in exchange for prohibiting the hiring of illegal workers -- a provision that has been enforced only sporadically. It was a raw deal for conservatives. On Tuesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) introduced a bill (HR 2164) to require nationwide use of the E-Verify system, which checks a job applicant's citizenship and immigration status, via the Internet, to see if he or she...

A top Republican has rejected the notion that Congress should re-examine the nation's gun laws after al Qaeda urged Muslims to attack America by exploiting loose firearm rules. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said tightening gun laws to address the threat would be to surrender to terrorists at the expense of Americans' rights. “We’ve seen time and again that terrorists will use anything, including our own rights and freedoms, to plot attacks against innocent Americans,” Smith said in an email. “But simply because terrorists abuse our liberties doesn’t mean that we should limit the...

“Patents would be issued to whoever files applications first and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office would be allowed to set its own fees under a measure introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives [H.R. 1249],” Susan Decker and Eric Engleman report for Bloomberg. “The proposal, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican, is similar to legislation passed by the Senate in a 95-5 vote on March 8. If approved and made law, it would mark a fundamental change in how patents are reviewed and the biggest revision to U.S. patent law since 1952.” “The...

Report clears Justice Department in Black Panther caseBy Krissah Thompson, Tuesday, March 29, 11:16 PM The Justice Department’s Office of Personnel Responsibility (OPR) has concluded an investigation finding that politics played no role in the handling of the New Black Panther Party case, which sparked a racially charged political fight. After reviewing thousands of pages of internal e-mails and notes and conducting 44 interviews with department staff members, the OPR reported that “department attorneys did not commit professional misconduct or exercise poor judgment” and that the voter-intimidation case against the Panthers was dismissed on “a good faith assessment of the...

Right Turn has obtained the first oversight letter from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) issued to the Justice Department. While he was in the minority, Smith labored, largely unsuccessfully, on the committee to convince the Democratic chairman to investigate a range of issues, including detainee policy and New Black Panther Party case. He now has the authority to schedule hearings, call witnesses and subpoena documents. In a five-page letter, Smith notes that there has been "little oversight" as to how the civil rights division has used its budget increases ($22 million in FYI 2010 and $17 million requested...