Liberty for the Little People

The Supreme Court decision on a campaign finance case by a Wisconsin pro-life group is a victory for free speech and a setback for McCain-Feingold and Sen. McCain's presidential campaign. This has been a particular sore point for conservatives, and McCain's autocratic contempt for free speech when it involves criticism of him or his buddy Sen. Feingold has been especially sanctimonious. George Will,RCP:

He and others favor construing his law in a way that would give regulators vast discretion to suppress speech. McCain and his acolytes argue that issue ads such as WRTL's will be discovered to be electioneering communications, if speech regulators delve deeply enough into the actual intent of those running the ad, or the regulators calculate the ad's likely effect.

Such delving and calculating were rejected by Chief Justice John Roberts as potentially chilling intrusions by government into citizens' participation in political argument. Instead, Roberts wrote, focusing on only the substance of the communication will entail "minimal if any" investigations of the communicators' states of mind, thereby avoiding a proliferation of factors that speech regulators will be allowed to weigh.

No thought police please.

You will note it is nanny-state liberals like Sen. Feingold, joined in this instance by a muddled McCain, who are eager to violate civil liberties for the little people, not the powerful:

In his concurrence, Scalia said that McCain-Feingold involves "wondrous irony." It ostensibly was written to restrain entities with "immense aggregations of wealth" that have "corrosive and distorting effects." These supposedly powerful entities were not powerful enough to prevent passage of the law. What the law actually muzzled faster than you can say "Michael Bloomberg," was little WRTL.

And this ties into the whole debate over "hate speech" laws, which also purport to know what people think and punish their thoughts.

These guys need to read Orwell again. "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

And this case has special poignancy, because the Wisconsin group was speaking on behalf of the least powerful of all, babies in the womb, who can't speak for themselves.