Campaign funds

In Arizona, election "reformers" wanted to limit the amount of money spent on campaigns -- handing an advantage to well-known incumbents. To pull this off, they've been bribing those who agree to limit expenditures by handing them tax money for their campaigns.

So if a challenger who's not accepting public funds raises too much money, Arizona makes up the difference by handing more taxpayer funds to the incumbent.

Fortunately, in another step back toward free speech and common sense, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped Arizona from distributing campaign subsidies to publicly funded candidates facing big-spending opponents.

The court granted a stay request from opponents of the decade-old law. The justices will now decide whether to review lower court decisions.

"The subsidies are an attempt to blunt the influence of campaign contributors," The Washington Post explains. "In order to keep the publicly financed candidates from being roundly outspent, new subsidies are doled out according to the fund-raising and spending of their privately financed opponents. But those candidates, some of whom are self-financed, say the law forces them to limit their spending to avoid triggering more public money for their opponents."

A federal judge in Arizona, quite sensibly, said that made the law unconstitutional. But the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals -- the nation's most collectivist -- disagreed, setting up the issue for the high court.

A brief submitted by an intervener in the case, Clean Elections Institute, said disallowing the subsidies would "likely distort the outcome of the 2010 elections in Arizona."

As an example, it pointed to the governor's race. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, a publicly funded candidate, is eligible to receive more than $2.1 million under the current plan. "If matching funds were enjoined, that amount will drop by 66 percent to $707,447." Her privately financed GOP opponent, the brief said, already has spent nearly $2.3 million.

In fact, it's the dole-out-the-taxpayer-funds scheme that distorts the outcome of Arizona elections. Campaign contributions are one way Americans can help promote the governing philosophy they favor. When did it become government's business to try and reverse such private judgments?

This is not about the merits of Gov. Brewer or her opponent. Arizona voters will decide that question. But the high court, which has been properly suspicious of many of these "campaign finance reform" schemes of late, should indeed review the Arizona law, and -- we hope -- throw it out.