Patrick Leahy: “last week's Washington Post proclaimed in one headline, ``High Tech is King of the Hill,'' citing the passage of several…”

“last week's Washington Post proclaimed in one headline, ``High Tech is King of the Hill,'' citing the passage of several bills which I actively supported, including restricting Internet taxes, enhancing protection for copyrighted works online, and encouraging companies to share information to avoid Year 2000 computer failures. Yet, anyone familiar with the Internet proposals buried in the Omnibus Appropriations measure would be writing a different headline this week. Certain provisions in this huge spending bill repeat the mistakes about regulating speech on the Internet that the last Congress made when it passed the Communications Decency Act, the ``CDA-I.'' I opposed the CDA from the start as fatally flawed and flagrantly unconstitutional. I predicted that the CDA would not pass constitutional muster and, along with Senator Feingold, sought to repeal the CDA so that we would not have to wait for the Supreme Court to fix our mistake. We did not fix the mistake and so, as I predicted, the Supreme Court eventually did our work for us. All nine Justices agreed that the CDA was, at least in part, unconstitutional. Justice Stevens, writing for seven members of the Court, called the CDA ``patently invalid'' and warned that it cast a ``dark shadow over free speech'' and ``threaten[ed] to torch a large segment of the Internet community.'' Reno v. ACLU, 117 S.Ct. 2329, 2350 (1997).”