HIGH COURT FIRM ON CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS

Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court has disappointed the self-appointed guardians of political hygiene: those who push something they insist on calling campaign finance reform. The high court refused to consider an appeal of a case that originated in Cincinnati. That city adopted an ordinance establishing limits on campaign expenditures for seats on the city council. A federal court struck down the ordinance, saying that it unconstitutionally violated protected free speech and so contravened the First Amendment. The Supreme Court's refusal even to consider the case means that ruling stands.

The reformers can't get past a simple fact: The expenditure of money in a political campaign is the exercise of free speech that must enjoy constitutional protection, pure and simple. So the Supreme Court held in the landmark 1976 case of Buckley v. Valeo, and so they have held at every subsequent opportunity.

Any who doubt this should consider the analogy of the right to travel, a basic freedom we all cherish. If government pronounced that Americans are free to travel, but restricted you to the expenditure of no more than $1,000 in annual travel expenditures, has government gutted your right to travel? Of course it has. Impose such a restriction, and the right is meaningless.

So it is with restrictions on campaign expenditures. In a free society we mustn't have government speech police telling us how much speech we can engage in, or hear, or read. The dirty little secret about such limits is that they protect the incumbents who directly benefit from them, precisely by limiting the speech their lesser-known challengers can engage in. Good for the Supreme Court, yet again, for stubbornly vindicating our free-speech rights.