Just ‘trust our incumbent senators’

Another week, another Supreme Court case on campaign finance reform.

Or so it seems.

On Tuesday, the justices again tackled the issue of money in politics when they heard yet another challenge to the 2002 McCain-Feingold monstrosity.

This time, the debate centers on a provision in the law that allows candidates to exceed certain spending limits if they're running against a wealthy opponent funding his own campaign.

There's no limit on how much of his own money a candidate can spend -- the courts have correctly held that capping such expenditures would violate an individual's First Amendment right to express himself.

So to "level the playing field" the law allows candidates facing such an opponent to receive larger contributions. And it also lets political parties spend unlimited amounts of money to help someone facing a wealthy opponent, while limiting contributions from the party of the wealthy candidate.

These provisions were challenged by Jack Davis of New York, a millionaire Democrat who lost races in 2004 and 2006 to Republican Rep. Tom Reynolds. The law says "we're going to make it easier for your opponent to beat you," said Mr. Davis' lawyer on Tuesday. He also argued that the law protects incumbents who can more easily tap campaign contributors.

He's right, of course. Most "campaign finance" reform amounts to an incumbent protection racket designed to make it more difficult for challengers to compete. Justice Antonin Scalia picked up on that theme when he said he was "deeply suspicious" of the regulations in question. "Do you think we should trust our incumbent senators and representatives to level the playing field for us?" he said during Tuesday's arguments.

Regardless of how the court rules, the case again highlights the Byzantine lengths to which "good government" reformers will go in their odd quest to limit the role of money in American politics. Whether it's a command-and-control regulatory structure that bans Americans from advocating for or against a specific candidate as an election nears, or the creation of arbitrary financing rules that apply to some office-seekers but not to others, the efforts are constitutionally troubling and counterproductive, as the money simply flows through new and different channels, leading supporters of "campaign finance reform" to then call for even more interventions.

And repeat.

If these so-called reformers truly sought to limit the role of money in Washington, they would be advocating for a more limited federal role in any number of endeavors. Instead, most of them are cheerleaders for the continuing expansion of the regulatory state.

One of the worst Supreme Court decisions of the past decade came in 2003 when the court's liberal wing carried the day in a 5-4 decision upholding McCain-Feingold, essentially ruling that the quest for the perfect campaign was more important than the First Amendment. If conservatives on the court now have to dismantle McCain-Feingold piecemeal, so be it. But it would be far preferable if they just blew it up altogether.