DATE: Sunday, November 9, 1997              TAG: 9711070198

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: DAVE ADDIS

                                            LENGTH:   72 lines

SENATE ICON ROBERT C. BYRD HAS CYBERSPACE 'TWEEN HIS EARS

This is the season when two good things happen: Mosquitoes begin to die and Congress goes home for the year. (Damage done by the former can be limited through a mix of sprays and ointments; no such remedy is available for the latter.)

Among the less-reported tempests in the congressional teapot this session was a modest proposal to allow senators to use laptop computers at their desks in the Senate chambers.

Students use laptops in classes; business execs use them on airplanes. A few baseball managers are sneaking them into the dugout. It would seem natural, then, to allow the 100 most influential lawmakers in the free world to come to work armed with as much information as possible.

Guess again. In the Senate, computers and all the facts that can be crammed into them are as welcome as flies in a punchbowl. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson called them ``ugly and distracting.'' (Somebody should remind Ms. Hutchinson, a Republican from Texas, that the city of Houston struggles under similar handicaps, but we haven't turned our backs on it.)

Remarkably, at least one senator objects to laptops because they might make his colleagues too well-informed. Robert Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat, worries that staff members could e-mail information, live-time, to senators on issues that are under discussion. ``You would no longer have to think for yourself out there on the floor,'' the horrified senator told a reporter for Hearst newspapers.

Imagine that. Fully briefed lawmakers who might base their decisions on timely information.

The stiffest opposition, predictably, comes from the stiffest senator. That would be Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who for 40 years has been as useful to progressive government as barnacles are to boats.

Byrd, the florid, white-maned protector of all Senate protocol, proudly proclaims his disdain for any idea not rooted in 18th-century sensibilities. You might recall the ugly dust-up he created last spring when he ejected from the Senate chamber a sight-impaired congressional aide who needs a seeing-eye dog to get around. (This is the same Senate that compelled the rest of us to live up to every comma in the Americans with Disabilities Act.)

``Forget about this so-called Information Revolution,'' Byrd huffed when asked about laptop computers. ``In the Senate, traditions still rule.''

Indeed. And the spread of information is not one of the traditions that Byrd has sworn to protect. The tradition Byrd most feverishly protects is the one that says every senator should be able to ship truckloads of government goodies back to his home state. In his 40 years in the Senate, Byrd has sucked so much pork out of the federal trough that his home turf should be renamed West Fatback.

Blowing the cover on the depth of his intellect, Byrd offered this further argument against computers on the Senate floor: ``I don't believe laptops are what Thomas Jefferson had in mind.''

Wrong-o, senator. Thomas Jefferson was a notorious gadgeteer, tinkerer and free-thinker. He was the founding father of the United States Patent Office.

The laptop writing desk he developed could be judged as the closest a man could come to building a portable information system in an age when electricity was viewed as having little more use than to light up Ben Franklin's key ring. He also invented the ``wheel cipher,'' which, as secretary of state, allowed him to encode sensitive dispatches on foreign policy and national security issues. Nobody called it ``ugly and distracting.'' One of his proudest possessions was a crude letter-copying device that was the first mechanical crack at the Xerox copier.

Thomas Jefferson was what techies call an ``early adopter.'' If he were alive today, there's little doubt that he'd be hard-wired to the Internet and that laptops would be welcome on the Senate floor. Nobody as small in spirit as Robert C. Byrd would be able to stand in his way. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing

RON CODDINGTON/KRT

Byrd

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