Think for a minute about how exciting the 1990s were. When, for
example, have we ever before had a president whose personal life was more like
an X-rated movie? When have we had a president and a First Lady who rented
out bedrooms in the White House as if they were running a “hot sheet” motel…
albeit for a lot more money?
When have we had a president who bombed
aspirin factories with long range missiles, who took sides in an ethnic dispute
and bombed the capital city of a Christian European nation, and who approved the
transfer of missile guidance technology to a nation that may one day be a
military adversary? And when have we had a president who sought and
obtained millions of dollars in illegal political contributions from that same
nation, the People’s Republic of China?
If all of those things had happened on the silver screen we would have
left the theater, saying, “Thank God that could never happen in real
life!” But it did. It all happened, and much more.
During 1996, the Clinton Administration agreed to give the People’s
Republic of China a complete set of magnetic tapes from the U.S. Patent Office
computers, containing every iota of U.S. technology registered with the patent
office for the past 160 years. Word of that agreement was printed,
prematurely, in an internal Commerce Department publication and the transfer of
the tapes was interrupted.
The people of America would never have known how many factories were
being built in remote provinces of China, employing people willing to work for
two or three dollars a day, and making products that should have been
manufactured by American workers.
Following that, in 1997, at the request of the Japanese government, the
Clinton Administration introduced legislation in the U.S. Congress that would
have destroyed the U.S. patent system. H 400 and S 507 of the
105th Congress were designed to destroy what has been the primary engine of our
economy since the earliest days of the republic, a core function of the federal
government, and it was done at the behest of foreign governments.
Among other changes, H 400 and S 507 removed the patent office from the
Department of Commerce and converted it into a wholly-owned corporate subsidiary
of the U.S. government, controlled by a six-member board of advisors, all drawn
from private industry, and all with vested interests in patent office
decisions.
H 400 and S 507 authorized the patent office to borrow money, to create
debt, and to retire debt through increased patent fees, a violation of Article
I, Section 8 of the Constitution which gives Congress the sole authority to
tax.
H 400 and S 507 authorized the patent office to accept
gifts, cash or in-kind, in any amount, from any source, foreign or domestic,
including those with vested interests in patent office decisions.
H 400 and S 507 required the patent office to disclose every technical
detail of every patent application just 18 months after filing… on average, some
thirty months before inventors received patent protection. This provision
would have allowed corporations, individuals, and foreign governments to steal
U.S. technology without having to worry about infringement.
And finally, H 400 and S 507 established a system of patent
reexaminations under which any individual or corporation, foreign or domestic,
for a $2000 fee, could cause any patent to be “reexamined.” And although
the patent holder would have been prohibited from selling, manufacturing, or
licensing a patent while it was under reexamination, the clock would have
continued to run on the seventeen year patent term. It was a license for
those with enough $2,000 filing fees to force inventors to sell their
intellectual properties for a fraction of their value.
If ever there
was an invitation to corruption, it was the Clinton Administration’s plan for
the reorganization of the U.S. Patent Office. It was pure Al Gore, right
out of his “reinventing America” playbook. I know. I was one of
three men hired to go to Washington in April 1997 to put an end to
this treachery.
When H 400 passed the House of Representatives on a voice vote, with no
member demanding a recorded vote, we knew we were in trouble. S 507 was
set to be reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by unanimous consent
the following week. We needed one member of the United States Senate with
the courage to stand before the Committee and object to the bill.
We decided to approach Senator Fred Thompson, and when S 507 came up in
committee he objected on the basis of national security. He had the
courage to defy the President and Vice President, the Japanese government, the
Chinese government, the Lippo Group of Indonesia, and eighty or ninety of
America’s largest multinational corporations. America dodged a
bullet in 1997 and Fred Thompson was the man who made it happen.
