Congressman Adam Smith

Adam Smith is the member of Congress who represents the 9th District of the State of Washington. He was reelected to his 14th term in 2022 with 71 percent of the vote and has been the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee since 2011. He served as chair of the committee from 2018–2022 when the Democrats controlled the majority in the U.S. House.

He grew up in SeaTac, Washington, in the center of the district he now represents. His father was a baggage handler at SeaTac airport and his mother was a homemaker. He worked his way through college loading trucks for UPS, earning a BA in political science from Fordham University in 1987. He spent his summers back home in the Seattle area working on political campaigns and doing various jobs to pay the bills. He got his law degree at the University of Washington in 1990, and that same year won election to the Washington State Senate becoming, at 25, the youngest state senator in the country at that time. Smith has been married since 1993 to his wife, Sara, and they have two children, Kendall, age 22, and Jack, age 19.