Senate's war against free speech

The following is an excerpt from the WSJ's Opinion Journal. The entire opinion written by Brian C Anderson can be read here: Shut up, they explained.

The most imminent danger comes from campaign-finance rules, especially those spawned by the 2002 McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act...It's easy to see why liberals have spearheaded the nation's three-decade experiment with campaign-finance...election-law reforms obstruct the kinds of political speech--political ads and perhaps now the feisty editorializing of the new media--that escape the filter of the mainstream press and the academy, left-wing fiefdoms still regulation-free.

McCain-Feingold, the latest and scariest step down that slope, makes it a felony for corporations, nonprofit advocacy groups and labor unions to run ads that criticize...members of Congress within 60 days of a federal election, when such quintessentially political speech might actually persuade voters. It forbids political parties from soliciting or spending "soft money" contributions to publicize the principles and ideas they stand for.

Campaign-finance reform has a squeaky-clean image, but the dirty truth is that this speech-throttling legislation is partly the result of a hoax perpetrated by a handful of liberal foundations, led by the venerable Pew Charitable Trusts. New York Post reporter Ryan Sager exposed the scam when he got hold of a 2004 videotape of former Pew official Sean Treglia telling a roomful of journalists and professors how Pew and other foundations spent years bankrolling various experts,...all aimed at fooling Washington...

In Foley's view, the chilling of speech is "the necessary price we must pay in order to have an electoral system that guarantees equal opportunity for all." But when these experts pen law-review articles with titles like "Campaign Finance Laws and the Rupert Murdoch (Fox News) Problem," you know it isn't the New York Times or CBS News that they have in mind.

Without the blogosphere, Howell Raines would still be the New York Times' editor, Dan Rather would only now be retiring, and John Kerry might be president of the U.S.,...