With impeccable timing, Congress has decided that it’s time it got to grips with the Internet – and it couldn’t have come at a better moment, with the Administration in disarray and the President so unpopular that Congressman in tricky seats and up for re-election in November, who would normally welcome a glitzy visit to their constituency from the President, are begging the White House to keep Bill Clinton away. Bill must feel like the Ethel Merman character in Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie, who sings I knew I was slipping at Minskys one dawn, when I started stripping, they hollered ‘put ’em on,’ and his remarkably inept handling of Congress is highlighted by the absurdity at the heart of the Crime Bill, which finally got through the House of Representatives after a late-night sitting. The Bill originally failed in part because a lot of liberal Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to vote a whole new set of offences for which the death penalty would be an option. But it is the Federal courts for which Congress legislates, and it’s state courts that sentence people to death – no Federal court has handed down a death sentence for over 30 years: the measure was only in the bill to make it look as if the Administration was being tough on crime. Clinton figured the electorate would be too dumb to spot the fallacy but it turned out that the liberal democrats were too dumb to spot it either, and a few quiet phone calls should have got the votes on that one. The vacillation over the bill, which most right-thinking people judged to be a Good Thing, if only for the new gun control measures it introduced, has done nothing to enhance Congress in the minds of the electorate – and now the House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology says that it has agreed to serve as beta tester for House Committees trying to learn how to use the Internet, and are trying to increase the number of people that know they have Internet access. It sounds like a fine time to give them a baptism of fire as their first experience of the Net – we recommend a sustained flaming from their irate computerate constituents as a satisfying prelude to throwing the bums out come November: throw your flame at Housesst(AT)hr.House.Gov.
