A photo of a bill-signing ceremony ran in The Washington Post last month, showing President Clinton putting his John Hancock on year-2000 liability legislation. The photo was no big deal, and probably ran because it was a slow news day. What the picture once again illustrated, however, was the growing political power of Silicon Valley.
The semiconductor industry and its information-technology partners started beating the drums for the liability legislation about six weeks ago. In a town where it can take a few sessions of Congress just to get a bill to the floor for a vote, the speed with which the year-2000 liability bill made it to the President's desk was astonishing. Especially so since signing the bill meant that President Clinton had to defy one of his biggest political and financial supporters, the nation's trial lawyers.
Not to be outdone, key members of the House and Senate fell all over one another to shift the September proposal onto the legislative fast track in October. The Senate Judiciary Committee rubber stamped the bill after a single hearing. In the chaos that has become the appropriations process, the year-2000 liability law got quick consideration as part of a foot-thick fiscal 1999 budget bill. In the "greatest deliberative body on Earth," one got the strong impression that senators were winking, nodding and saying, "Looks good to me. Next."
So as Cypress Semiconductor Corp. president T.J. Rodgers complained on The New York Times' op-ed pages about the Justice Department picking on poor ol' Microsoft, the rest of the government was doing backflips to keep the rest of the electronics industry happy. (By the way, Rodgers, paragon of the free market, also got what he wanted in the budget deal, as Congress finally approved high-tech visa legislation that the Cypress chief executive had personally lobbied for and that most U.S. engineers fear.)
The long view is that the year-2000 liability legislation will probably do some good over the next 14 months as U.S. computer companies seek to share technical data with their customers on how to fix the millennium bug. If the lights don't go out on Times Square at midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, if airplanes don't start falling from the sky, if my kid's computer games don't crap out, the legislation probably will have served the common good.
Besides, nobody's going to shed a tear if some trial lawyers lose a few billable hours.
Still, it's chilling to see how the honchos of high-tech can so quickly line up their political ducks in a row. To be sure, proposing the anti-liability legislation just before the November congressional elections was no accident.
The swift passage of the year-2000 liability legislation and the President's signature probably has as much to do with politicians not wanting to be seen in an election year as siding with trial lawyers, whom most of the country views as the source of all evil in the universe. Still, it would have been nice to have actually debated the year-2000 proposal on its merits before the bill was approved faster than you can say "campaign contribution."
When it comes to re-election, Congress is able to kick the legislative process into high gear.
