When John McCain co-authored the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law he probably didn’t envision it helping him lose his run for the presidency in 2008, but such is the law of unintended consequences.  McCain-Feingold restricted large donors from taking out ads in support of candidate and issues. This mainly penalized corporate donors. When Obama reneged on his commitment to participate in federal financing for his general election campaign, McCain was left holding the bag. He was restricted as to how much money he could spend. If his law hadn’t existed, he would have been able to get around that problem and match Obama’s media saturation.

The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law was unconstitutional on its face, and no true conservative could believe it when President Bush signed it into “law.”  Even though our representatives swear an oath to defend the constitution, they continually pass laws that subvert it. One of the only remedies to this is the courts, and finally today the SCOTUS essentially nullified the law in a 5 to 4 decision. (more…)

Fans of the First Amendment can rejoice.  In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court today struck down large portions of the abomination known as the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, especially those aspects of the law that imposed restrictions on corporate spending on political issues.

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.

The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment’s most basic free speech principle — that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy.

“If the First Amendment has any force,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, which included the four members of its conservative wing, “it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”

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