William Lamberth

He was born on December 5, 1977 in Bowling Green, Kentucky.[1] He is a fifth generation resident of Sumner County, Tennessee, and grew up on a farm in Tennessee.[2][4] He attended Portland High School.[1][2] He graduated from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, Tennessee in 2001 and received a J.D. from the William & Mary School of Law in Williamsburg, Virginia in 2004, where he was elected President of the Student Bar Association.[1][2]

He was an Assistant District Attorney for Sumner County.[3][4] He now practices law as a private attorney in Gallatin, Tennessee.[1][3]

He was elected as state representative for the forty-fourth district Tennessee in 2012, replacing Democratic representative Mike McDonald.[1][2][3]

He is former president of the Rotary Club of Gallatin, Tennessee and the Sumner County Bar Association, and former treasurer of the Republican Party of Sumner County.[1][2] He is also Chairman of the Portland Community Education Foundation, table host and donor to the Cumberland Crisis Pregnancy Center in Gallatin.[1][2] He also donates to the Middle Tennessee Mission Outreach and regularly goes on Christian missions to Honduras and other regions of the world that are in need of humanitarian relief efforts.[1][2]

In 2023, Lamberth supported a resolution to expel three Democratic lawmakers from the legislature for violating decorum rules. The expulsion was widely characterized as unprecedented.[5]

In 2022, after accepting over $50,000 in campaign donations from Jack Daniel's and other alcohol suppliers, multiple detention facility operators and various pharmaceutical companies,[6] Lamberth embarked on a personal crusade [7] to ban all forms of cannabis in Tennessee containing greater than .3% THC.[8] This effort to ban came in spite of overwhelming public support of cannabis legalization,[9] federal legality of non-delta 9 THC[10] and a clear position from the FDA and USDA [10] that delta 8 THC is not a controlled substance.[11]

Lamberth has been criticized by the LGBT community for supporting bills to criminalize doctors performing gender reassignment surgery on minors,[12] requiring transgender people to use public restrooms corresponding to their biological sex,[13] and requiring transgender athletes in high school to compete in collegiate sports that correspond to their biological sex.[14]

He is married to Lauren Schmidt Lamberth, and has two children.[4] He is a Baptist.[1][2] He lives in Cottontown, Tennessee with his family.[1][3]