What if all the angels stand on one foot?

Once you begin haggling over the details -- it's OK prior to 60 days before an election but not after, a 90-minute movie might be OK but not a 30-second commercial, this money is good but that money is corrupting -- you have lost sight of the fact that the fundamental premise of the whole damn thing is a fraud perpetrated by charlatans against liberty and democracy.

Reading the 68-page transcript of this past week's Supreme Court arguments over whether spending for promotion of "Hillary: The Movie" violated the McCain-Feingold Act was like watching 11 people debate whether the ship they are on should sink bow-first or stern-first. They kept arguing about whether the movie was covered by the scope of the law and only occasionally raised the question of whether the law itself violated the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment prohibition against government abridgement of free speech.

At the heart of the case is a 90-minute, limited-release movie created by Citizens United, which was largely critical of Hillary Clinton during her 2008 Democratic presidential primary bid. The Federal Election Commission ruled that, under McCain-Feingold, corporate money could not be spent to promote the movie on a video-on-demand cable channel.

You see, McCain-Feingold was passed by Congress -- and fundamentally twice upheld by the Supreme Court, though it chipped away at some aspects -- under the rotten rubric that the people are just too gosh darned gullible to be exposed to the corrupting influence of campaign messages financed by wealthy corporations and unions. (Wealthy political action committees and individuals are another matter.)

Persuasion is persuasion. Whether it is financed by a candidate, a party, a company, a union, a newspaper, a foreign power. In a democratic republic, anything short of vote buying or bribery should be not just permitted but encouraged.

Why do you think it is called a marketplace of ideas? Let the best argument sway the people -- whether it comes at them in printed newspapers or books, in the mail, via brief television commercials, lengthy movies, over the phone, via the Internet, skywriting or door-to-door canvassing. The people can accept or reject without any guidance from our elected lawmakers out to protect their own sinecures.

It will be interesting to see whether the court this time, as it failed to do in 2007 in a case called Wisconsin Right to Life, stops chipping away at the law and instead fells it with a double-bladed ax. I had some hopes in 2007 when Justice Antonin Scalia said of the court's prior ruling in a case called McConnell: "Maybe we were wrong last time." But, no, here we are again.

In arguing for Citizens United on Tuesday, attorney Theodore Olson pointed out just how slippery this statute is, noting that in the past six years the justices of the Supreme Court have written 22 separate opinions on it. He had the unenviable task of arguing the constitutionality of the law while still holding out for his client under the law as already interpreted by the court.

Under questioning by Justice Stephen Breyer, Olson outlined this bizarre scenario: "(I)f your name is General Electric (owner of NBC) rather than General Motors, if your name is Disney, if your name is George Soros, if your name is National Public Radio," you may freely present such a movie.

"What you're suggesting is that a long discussion of facts, record, history, interviews, documentation, and that sort of thing, if it's all negative, it can be prohibited by -- and it's a felony. You (as an non-exempted corporation) can go to jail for five years for sharing that information with the American public, or if it's all favorable, you can go to jail. But if you did half and half, you couldn't."

That sure sounds like discriminating against a message on the basis of content, something past courts have found objectionable. And Olson called it what it is: Prior restraint.

Later Chief Justice John Roberts managed to get the government's lawyer to admit that, if a corporation published a 500-page book that ends by saying vote for X, it could be banned. Banned by Congress, an underground best-seller.

The whole premise of McCain-Feingold is an affront the principles of the Founders. This is the court's third chance to take a whack at it. Let's hope they don't whiff again.

The justices should declare McCain-Feingold unfair, un-American, untenable, unconscionable, unfathomable, unenforceable and, most definitely, unconstitutional.

Thomas Mitchell is editor of the Review-Journal and writes about the role of the press and free speech. He may be contacted at 383-0261 or via e-mail at tmitchell@rewviewjournal.com. Read his blog at lvrj.com/blogs/mitchell.