BASIC RIGHTS ASSAILED IN SO-CALLED REFORM

Many Washington pundits are all agog with the need for something they love to call campaign finance reform. The object of their current fancy is the McCain-Feingold bill currently being debated in the U.S. Senate. About that bill, nationally syndicated columnist George Will has done some of the most penetrating analysis. Writing on our Perspectives page last Sunday, Will described the "unprecedentedly sweeping attack on freedom of expression" launched by members of what he calls the "Washington political class," egged on by "the exhorting, collaborative media." Warming to his subject, Will continued:

"Nothing in American history -- not the left's recent campus `speech codes,' not the right's depredations during the 1950s McCarthyism or the 1920s `red scare,' not the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s -- matches the menace to the First Amendment posed by campaign `reforms' advancing under the protective coloration of political hygiene."

Will has it absolutely right. What is currently being called "campaign finance reform" is really an unprecedented attempt by certain elites to control and limit speech -- the very currency of debate in a free society. This is so because, as the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in 1976, spending money in a political campaign to disseminate ideas is, literally, the exercise of protected free speech. Subsequent decisions have uniformly upheld this ruling.

There is no way around this fundamental truth. Acknowledging it, a few liberals such as House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt have flat-out come out for amending the First Amendment to place limits on how much speech a free society can permit. Their argument, chilling and appalling though it is, at least has the virtue of candor. They unabashedly admit what the other reformers won't: The current political class wants less speech and they want to decide which Americans get to speak, when and how much.

McCain-Feingold is a constitutional catastrophe that is much worse than doing nothing. The answer to money in politics is full disclosure: Publish the donations, the amounts and the sources and let the people decide. Current technology allows -- and a simple change in disclosure laws could require -- immediate disclosure of contributions on the Internet within 24 hours of their receipt. Also,lawmakers should raise the silly $1,000 contribution limit, established by law in 1974, when a Ford Mustang cost $2,700. These simple reforms would do more to clean up campaigns than all the pious claptrap flying under the banner of campaign finance reform.