In early February 1997, I received a telephone call from a longtime friend in Washington.\u00a0 He was calling to say that we were being recruited for a very important assignment, an assignment related to national security.<\/p>\n
He explained that, in 1996, the Clinton administration agreed to give the People\u2019s Republic of China a complete set of magnetic tapes from the U.S. Patent Office computers, containing every iota of American technology registered with the patent office in the previous 160 years.\u00a0 With the information from those tapes on their computers, the Chinese would know exactly how to make everything we make.\u00a0 But more importantly, by tracking the long-term development of every conceivable kind of technology and extrapolating the path of development into the future, the Chinese could \u201cleap-frog\u201d our own technological development.<\/p>\n
No American president could possibly think it was a good idea to do such a thing \u2013 unless, of course, he owed a debt of gratitude to the Chinese and he was more concerned about that than he was about the future prosperity of the American people.\u00a0 The American people would never have known how many factories were being built in remote provinces of China, employing workers who were happy to work for two or three dollars a day.\u00a0 When the proposed technology transfer was inadvertently reported in a Commerce Department newsletter, the offer was withdrawn.<\/p>\n
But what was potentially more damaging to the United States was contained in a Memorandum of Understanding with the Japanese government, signed by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown\u2026 an agreement to introduce legislation in the U.S, Congress that would destroy the U.S. patent system, as we know it .\u00a0 The vehicles for that treachery, already introduced in Congress, were H.400 and S.507, the House and Senate versions of the Omnibus Patent Reform Act of 1997.<\/p>\n
Because the legislation was so thoroughly \u201cwired\u201d on both sides of the aisle, our employers \u00a0were seeking a small team of experienced government relations professionals who\u2019d been in the political arena long enough that many of their longtime friends had risen to become influential members of Congress.\u00a0 They were looking for lobbyists who were on a first-name basis with members of Congress\u2026. men whose reputations in the political world were such that they could ask members of Congress to take certain actions, on faith alone, and expect those requests to be honored.<\/p>\n
What made the task so difficult was the fact that the legislation was supported, not only by the President and Vice President of the United States, but by the Peoples Republic of China, the Japanese government, the Indonesian Lippo Group, and eighty or ninety of America\u2019s largest multinational corporations\u2026 all but assuring the neutrality of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.<\/p>\n
On the day that we arrived in Washington, April 12, 1997, we tuned in to C-Span just in time to see the House of Representatives pass H.400 on a voice vote.\u00a0 Not one member of the House of Representatives demanded a roll call vote on a bill that would severely emasculate a core function of the federal government.<\/p>\n
When we were finally able to obtain a copy of S.507, we read it very carefully and we were horrified.\u00a0 Never in all of our years as lobbyists had we ever read a worse piece of legislation.\u00a0 If we had ever wondered what it was that the Chinese received in return for the millions of dollars they poured into the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign in 1996, there was no longer any doubt:<\/p>\n
Clearly, the latter two provisions were included in order to attract the support of America\u2019s largest multinational corporations.\u00a0 If ever there was an invitation to corruption, the Clinton-Gore Omnibus Patent Reform Act of 1997 was it.\u00a0 The bills had no redeeming value whatsoever, and there was nothing in either bill for the American people.\u00a0 But when we saw who was supporting the bills we could understand their motivation.<\/p>\n
We were up against the most powerful coalition of political and moneyed interests in the world, and the bill they were supporting was potentially more damaging to the nation\u2019s economy and to intellectual property rights than anything the nation had previously experienced.\u00a0 Our \u201cmission impossible,\u201d if we chose to accept it, was to see to it that neither of the bills would ever reach Bill Clinton\u2019s desk.<\/p>\n
Our initial strategy was to find just one senator who\u2019d be willing to stand up and oppose S.507, even to the point of staging a filibuster.\u00a0 Unfortunately, what we found was that no member of the senate, other than Senator Orrin Hatch, the Senate sponsor, had focused sufficiently on the bill to know what it was all about.\u00a0 Then, on Tuesday May 20, we learned that Hatch had set a \u201cmarkup\u201d session in the Judiciary Committee for the morning of Thursday, May 22.<\/p>\n
We\u2019d been able to learn from friendly sources in the Senate that Hatch had arranged for S.507 to be reported out of his the Judiciary Committee by \u201cunanimous consent,\u201d meaning that, under Senate rules, the bill could then be passed on the floor of the Senate by \u201cunanimous consent\u201d \u2013 without debate.\u00a0 The railroad was well-oiled.<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, May 21, my associate and I placed a call to our friend, Governor Don Sundquist, of Tennessee.\u00a0 After a brief explanation of what we were up against, we asked the governor to call Senator Fred Thompson, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and ask him to object when the bill was called up in committee.<\/p>\n
The following day, as Senator Hatch took his seat in the cavernous Judiciary Committee hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, he was confident that he would pass S.507 out of his committee by unanimous consent.\u00a0 But that was not to be.\u00a0 When Senator Hatch called for the vote on S.507, Senator Thompson rose from his chair, pounded his fist on the table, and shouted, \u201cNO, BY GOD, SENATOR.\u00a0 I OBJECT!\u201d<\/p>\n
In that instant, the most damaging piece of legislation in recent memory came to a screeching halt.\u00a0 There would be no \u201cunanimous consent\u201d in the Senate committee, and there would be no \u201cunanimous consent\u201d on the floor of the Senate.\u00a0 S.507 had suddenly become just another Senate bill \u2013 subject to all the political give-and-take of the \u201cworld\u2019s greatest deliberative body.\u201d<\/p>\n
I tell this story now because those who wish to destroy the U.S. patent system, the constitutional wealth-generator that has been the \u201cengine\u201d of our prosperity since the first days of our republic (whoever \u201cthey\u201d are), have waged a never-ending attack on the system since the day we defeated them in 1997.\u00a0 This year is no different. \u00a0When the Senate returns from its August recess, the members will be asked to end a filibuster against passage of H.R. 1249, the Smith-Leahy Patent Reform Act of 2011.\u00a0 It is essentially the same bill that we defeated in 1997 and it deserves the same fate.<\/p>\n
If we care about preserving our standard of living for future generations, we should all call our senators and demand that they vote \u201cno\u201d on the motion to invoke cloture.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In early February 1997, I received a telephone call from a longtime friend in Washington.\u00a0 He was calling to say that we were being recruited for a very important assignment, an assignment related to national security. He explained that, in … Continue reading