It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever done. We found our local representative, Pete Stark over in East Bay and Pete and a few of us sat down an we wrote a bill. We literally drafted a bill to make these changes. We said “If this law changes we will donate a hundred thousand computers at a cost of ten million dollars to us.” We called it “the kids can’t wait bill”. Pete Stark introduced it in the House and Senator Danforth introduced it in the Senate and I refused to hire any lobbyists and I went back to Washington myself and I actually walked the halls of Congress for about two weeks, which was the most incredible thing. I met probably two-thirds of the House and over half of the Senate myself and sat down and talked with them.
It was very interesting. I found that the House Members are routinely less intelligent than the Senate and they were much more kneejerk to their constituencies—which I found initially quite offensive but came to understand later to be a really good idea. Maybe that’s what the framers wanted. They weren’t supposed to think too much, they were supposed to represent. The Senators are supposed to think a little more. The Bill passed the House with the largest favorable majority of any tax bill in the history of this country. What happened was it was in during Carter’s lame duck session and Bob Dole who was then Speaker of the House killed it. He would not bring it to the floor and we ran out of time. We would have had to have started the process over in the next year and I gave up.
