On a 100-degree day in Washington, D.C., Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, arrived at his office at the Cannon House Office Building wearing gym clothes.
The longtime congressman, who had just finished a workout, spoke with JNS as he was preparing to head home to Bellevue, Wash., for the July 4 weekend.
He told JNS that democratic socialists are exploiting income inequality to promote policies, which he thinks will fail, and that many antisemites are trying to mask their Jew-hatred as criticism of Israeli politics.
A full-on socialist model has never succeeded anywhere on earth, according to the congressman.
“Throughout the history of this country, whenever we’ve been in these places before, regulated capitalism has worked,” he told JNS. “Being against capitalism is like being against gravity. It just is.”
Capitalism “recognizes that people tend to follow their selfish interests at times,” he said.
The congressman didn’t say that he got the idea of financial benefits of selfish interests from 18th century Scottish economist Adam Smith, who famously referred to an “invisible hand,” but Rep. Smith told JNS that “my namesake was in favor of regulated capitalism.”
A “dedicated group” in the democratic socialist movement doesn’t believe “fundamentally” in the American democratic experiment, according to the Washington Democrat.
“They think white, Western culture is oppressive, racist, bigoted, terrible and that America represents that and that must be smashed,” he said.
JNS asked Smith about former U.S. vice president Kamala Harris meeting recently with democratic socialists.
“First of all, Kamala Harris is a bad national candidate. She should step aside,” he said. “It’s sad that she’s still trying.”
“She had her chance, OK?” he added. “We can all make excuses, but let’s move on.”
Smith also called former U.S. President Joe Biden a “terrible candidate in 2020, just as much as he was in 2024.”
“I am not a Joe Biden fan,” he told JNS. “I think that really, really hurt us.”
Smith said that he likes Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired astronaut who is married to former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, as a potential presidential candidate.
There are “a lot of qualified Democrats out there,” he said, naming Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish, as well as Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore.
“The question is, will our party allow someone to be themselves, or are we going to do the interest group thing?” he said. “This group doesn’t want me to say that, and that group wants me to say this, and that group over there wants me to say that. So I better use the right word, and I better not say that.”
“You come out like plastic, and you don’t even know what you believe anymore, because you’re simply trying to adhere to whatever the ideological requirements are of the moment,” he said. “I want a candidate who says, ‘Yeah, f*** that. This is what I believe, and if you don’t believe that, let’s have an argument.’”
That, in fact, is one of the strengths of U.S. President Donald Trump, according to Smith.
“He’s doing what he’s doing, which is disastrous in my mind, but it gives him an authenticity thing that we don’t have,” he told JNS.
Smith told JNS that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be a better choice than U.S. Vice President JD Vance as the next Republican presidential candidate.
“Vance, I don’t know what that guy believes, but he goes in a lot of strange directions,” he said. “He’s smart enough, but Rubio at times has proven himself to be capable of being reasonable, which is why I don’t think he’s got a hope in hell of actually getting the nomination.”
‘Somebody screaming in your face’
Smith, who was born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Washington state, worked his way through college by loading trucks for United Parcel Service.
After law school, he worked as an attorney before serving as a prosecutor for the city of Seattle and as a pro tem judge. In 1991, he was elected to the Washington state Senate, and in 1996, he won his seat in the House.
He spoke to JNS in his office, which reflects his Pacific Northwest roots. Photographs of Washington state landscapes covered the blue walls, and hundreds of military challenge coins, collected during his years as the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, filled a glass coffee table and a bowl on his desk.
Nearby, a figurine of a shark with a laser beam attached to its head, which sat on an end table, was a gift connected to his work on simplifying amphibious landing craft.
Smith’s son works in Virginia for a private company, and his daughter, Kendall, 25, is a legislative assistant for Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas). “She works in the building,” Smith told JNS. “Kendall’s two floors down. Today I was like, ‘Let’s grab a sandwich. If you’re around, do you want to come?’ So she came, sat down and chatted.”
On a more serious topic, he told JNS about the recent Washington State Democratic Party platform, which blames the Israeli government for the rise in Jew-hatred worldwide.
Jews who might have lobbied the party not to include the offensive language likely avoided the state’s convention in June, because “you’re gonna have somebody screaming in your face about what an awful human being you are,” Smith told JNS.
“You saw what happened with Scott Wiener down in San Francisco,” he said. “I’ve lived that. There has been a concentrated campaign that can only be described as threats, intimidation and harassment. Not just against me, against my family, against my staff, against my neighbors.”
Anti-Israel activists have protested outside Smith’s home in Bellevue and vandalized it. The husband of his political opponent, socialist Kshama Sawant, allegedly assaulted one of Smith’s staffers.
“It is not an accident that the folks on the far left use threats, harassment and intimidation,” Smith told JNS. “They are actively trying to silence people who disagree with them.”
“If you’re an average person just wanting to show up at a district Democrat meeting, and you say something people disagree with, and you’re going to get screamed at or maybe get fired, people aren’t going to want to do that,” he said.
“That is completely outside of what America is supposed to be about: robust debate and difference of opinion,” he said.
Smith told JNS that activists have “lumped in” Israel with “white Western culture.”
“I guess we’re not going to count the fact that the Jews were there in the first place. We’ll go back however many thousand years for different indigenous people but not for the Jews,” he said. “It has become a proxy for that larger argument that white Western culture is wrong, settler colonialism is wrong, Israel shouldn’t have existed in the first place.”
“I don’t believe everyone who is opposed to Israel is an antisemite, but it certainly gives ground for the antisemites to go find a place to hang out,” he said.
‘Weird idea of fun’
When he isn’t confronting Jew-hatred on both sides of the aisle and decrying democratic socialism, what does the congressman do for fun, JNS asked.
“I really haven’t had fun,” he told JNS, citing the U.S. president as the reason.
“I felt Trump, forgive me, is a fundamental threat to the American experiment, and I had to be a voice, and I could see that the voices that were going to rise up against Trump were going to be extreme in their own way,” he said.
“I felt more of an obligation in the last 18 months to be everywhere,” he told JNS.
“I need to maybe give it a break from time to time,” he told JNS. “I still follow sports. I still like to read.” Smith just finished reading a trilogy by author Tana French, and Liane Moriarty is one of his favorite writers.
“I have a weird idea of fun,” he admitted.
Smith exercises and takes walks in his neighborhood but is “always thinking while I’m walking,” he said.
