After the Supreme Court struck down major portions of the McCain-Feingold campaign-reform law (aka the Bipartisan Campaign Reform ACT), Democrats in Congress began demanding a Constitutional amendment to limit political speech in order to counter the Citizens United v. FEC ruling. Don’t count Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) among them, though. The bill’s namesake says he opposes any attempt to change the First Amendment:
Wisconsin Sen. Russell Feingold (D) on Thursday said he opposes a constitutional amendment to overturn a controversial Supreme Court decision last week that allowed an influx of corporate spending in political campaigns….
“I think it’s very unwise to change the Bill of Rights for any purpose,” Feingold told The Hill. “I have taken that position against a number of very unwise ideas from the Contract With America crowd who helped make sure those amendments didn’t get passed… The Constitution is the most important thing to me. I do acknowledge that the Supreme Court’s lawless decision, which may have been one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court, does at least make people want to talk about that. And it concerns me, because the court is being reckless. But I am loath to do it.”
That hyperbole is just absurd. Even if one is inclined to view Citizens United as a bad decision, does Feingold really intend to argue that it was even arguably worse than Dred Scott, widely acknowledged as the most craven and unjust SCOTUS decision in history? Worse than Plessy v Ferguson, which kept public schools segregated for decades? Citizens United takes us back to the 2002 status quo, reversing the very obvious encroachment on free speech that the BCRA created, and strips incumbents of a particularly nasty protection racket.
Since Constitutional amendments require a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress (as well as the ratification by three-quarters of the states), Feingold’s demurral effectively puts an end to the effort by John Kerry and others to attempt to make government the arbiter of which political speech can be published by whom and at what time. McCain has yet to weigh in on this issue, but without Feingold, Kerry won’t even get a majority to ride along on an effort that will only inflame public opinion even further against incumbent Democrats.
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