As this article in the Washington Post points out, a three-judge panel in Washington, D.C. has declared most of the soft-money prohibitions included in the McCain-Feingold Act to be unconstitutional. There will undoubtedly be an appeal, so that the Supreme Course is likely to hear the case before the year is out.
I’ll leave it to the legal experts of this forum to comment on the importance of this development, but the suspicious side of me has a nagging question. Given that these provisions seemed so obviously and manifestly unconstitutional, did members of both parties (but particularly the Democrats, who would suffer disproportionately from its effects) support the bill with the expectation that its most objectionable parts would be struck down?
It’s good that the courts have taken an axe to that awful bill. But President Bush should never have signed it in the first place. He knew very well that it was unconstitutional, and was told by conservatives (and others) to veto it, but he wimped out. Bush has never had much of a backbone.