WASHINGTON — When Dallas U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson took charge of the House science committee after the 2018 midterms, she left no doubt a new sheriff was in town.
Another Texan, an ardent climate denier, had chaired the panel for six years, using his power to harass scientists and slow momentum for demands to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Johnson devoted her first hearing to spotlighting the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real, dangerous and driven by human activity.
“We deal with science on the Science, Space and Technology Committee — and facts,” Johnson said this month in Scotland at a major United Nations conference on climate. “We live with climate change. We talk about it, we’ve studied it. ... Inaction is really not an option.”
After three decades in Congress, Johnson’s career is at a pinnacle as she announced her retirement on Saturday.
At 85, turning 86 in December, she’s the second-oldest member of the House and the longest-serving Texan. Like other Democrats eyeing the exits, she’s familiar with the long history of midterm elections, when a president’s party almost always suffers huge losses.
That’s how she got the gavel halfway through Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s how she would probably lose it in 2022, as voters deliver judgment on President Joe Biden.
So Johnson is going out on top as the most powerful Texan in the House, and the state’s only committee chair.
She quickly emerged as a leading critic.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Trump cut U.S. support for the World Health Organization, Johnson hit hard with the moral authority of the first nurse elected to Congress.
“The United States cannot afford assaults on science and facts at any time, least of all during this pandemic,” she said.
As she noted Saturday, by the time she became chairwoman, “I had been in Congress 26 years, only six of them in the majority. So you know I had to work across party lines to get things done. And as much as we trash the names of some of the Republicans, they were some of the same ones that helped me be successful.”
Johnson was elected in 1992 and immediately joined the science panel. She’d been living near Texas Instruments, where Jack Kilby had developed the first integrated circuit, and she coveted the assignment. Many lawmakers do not.
“Everybody picks committees [where] they think they can raise money easily,” Johnson told Politico in early 2019, at the outset of her tenure as chair. “You can’t expect scientists to have as much money as an oil person. But they probably have more to offer in terms of the future.”
In the state Senate, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock had put Johnson in charge of redistricting.
“Let me tell you, that’s the worst job I’ve ever had in my life,” she said Saturday.
Maybe so. But it did let her customize the district she would hold for decades. It started as a “rattlesnake” that twisted from Fort Worth to Dallas to McKinney, she recalled. In its seventh and current configuration, the 30th district covers southern Dallas County and much of the city, including downtown and Love Field.
On this turf, for Johnson, cash was never a key to winning. She ran campaigns on a shoestring, always coasting to reelection.
Johnson had served as chief psychiatric nurse at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Dallas, and public health was always a priority.
“I’m a nurse and my specialty is psychiatric nursing. That has helped me” in Congress, she said Saturday, eliciting laughter at Kirkwood Temple CME Church in Dallas.
After 18 years on the science panel, Johnson became the top Democrat after the 2010 elections.
A fellow Texan, Ralph Hall, was the newly minted Republican chairman.
They’d both served in the Legislature. Hall was a booster of the oil and gas industry, but they got along well. When he changed parties in 2004, Johnson was one of the few Texas Democrats who’d reached out to say she still loved him.
“He admitted being so happy to hear my message because his wife was mad at him. Some said she actually had him sleeping on the couch,” she recalled later. Hall, she would say, had a rare knack “to transcend the extreme partisan climate” in Washington.
But Hall lost his primary two years later.
House Republicans replaced him with a far more partisan science chairman, San Antonio’s Lamar Smith.
For the next six years, spanning President Barrack Obama’s second term and the first half of the Trump era, Smith and Johnson tangled as he turned a typically low-key panel focused on NASA and research into a laboratory for ideological warfare.
Smith used the perch to harass climate scientists and cut funding for projects that lacked a clear “national interest” justification. Johnson accused him of “politicizing” science by cutting funds for renewable energy, biology, environmental and climate change research.
In 2015, during a monthslong probe of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration researchers, she accused Smith of indulging in a “fishing expedition” and an “ideological crusade” aimed at kicking up enough doubt to block political consensus to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“The only thing you accused NOAA of doing is engaging in climate science — i.e., doing their jobs,” she asserted in a terse letter to Smith ahead of international climate talks.
“They are abandoning our future,” she said during a debate over a Republican budget that cut outlays for research and development.
On election night 2018, when Democrats won control of the House, Johnson vowed to “restore the credibility of the science committee” after six years of antagonism to scientists who dared speak out on climate change or even to conduct research that, inevitably, offered further evidence to support the scientific consensus on the growing crisis.
“It’s nonsense for us to sit here and ignore that it’s happening and waste our time without having any plan for what we should be doing to save our planet and the lives and the money it takes to clean up after disasters,” she told Science Insider. “We see the weather is changing. The type of floods, the destruction from the winds — we cannot just continue to just clean up after this happens. … It might make more sense to focus on building a wall on the Gulf [of Mexico] at Houston rather than a border wall between the United States and Mexico.”
When Trump announced in June 2017 that the United States would pull out of the Paris Agreement, there was little Johnson could do but complain. As chair 18 months later, she had a bully pulpit.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that climate change is one of the greatest challenges confronting our nation,” she said when she unveiled a bill to undo Trump’s disavowal of the Paris deal, and prod the federal government to curb pollution.
The committee’s work covers a broad range of topics.
In April, Johnson and Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican, teamed up on legislation aimed at weatherizing the Texas power grid, in response to the devastating blackout that left millions shivering during a winter storm.
Last Monday, she blasted Russia for testing an anti-satellite weapon that created a cloud of space debris and forced the crew of the International Space Station to take shelter, calling it an “appalling and reckless action.”
At a hearing in September on NASA’s plans for low Earth orbit space flights, she referred to “private space tourist missions” as “novelties.” Billionaires in zero gravity draw attention. But Congress and NASA face important questions about how long the International Space Station should operate and what comes next.
“Important work remains to be done, including research on human health and performance in space, fundamental microgravity science, life support systems for deep space exploration, and next-generation space suit development and testing,” she said. “I hope that we also continue to maintain a focus on STEM engagement and inspiring our youth. America’s future depends on a 21st-century workforce that can continue our science and innovation capabilities, including in space.”
In and out of the majority, Johnson has been a leading advocate for science, technology, engineering and math education, and for encouraging girls and women to pursue STEM training and careers.
Her first bill in the Legislature in 1974, in fact, was aimed at growing the ranks of women in science.
In the 1990s, during Johnson’s early years in the House, a committee study found that women got far less opportunity and credit for their contributions. Two decades later, she lamented to Science Insider, not much has changed.
Women account for more than half of medical students, she noted, “but we need to make an impact across the board, especially in engineering and math. We cannot afford to sacrifice 50% of our brainpower.”
