For the most part, I am trying to stay out of the ’08 election until, you know…’08, if possible. But I thought Charlotte Allen’s Weekly Standard article on McCain and the National Right to Life Committee was well-done and worth a read.

The National Right to Life Committee (NRLC) regards McCain-Feingold as a major hindrance to its mission of pro-life advocacy–and, pari passu, McCain himself as something close to a personal enemy. A so-far-successful constitutional challenge to a key portion of McCain-Feingold mounted by an NRLC affiliate, Wisconsin Right to Life, is pending in the Supreme Court, with oral argument set for Wednesday, April 25. At issue is a provision banning ads that mention the names of candidates for public office within certain "blackout periods" ranging from 30 to 60 days before an election–if funds from corporations or unions are used to pay for the ads. Abortion is the kind of neuralgic issue that most large corporations–the kind of influence-peddlers that are presumably the target of McCain-Feingold–tend to shy away from, and most donors to the NRLC and its affiliates are individuals of modest means and strong religious beliefs. Nonetheless, a small percentage of the NRLC’s donations–a little over 2 percent–come from corporations (including nonprofits) and religious organizations (the figure is from the year 2003, when the NRLC took in $13.6 million in contributions, including $295,124 from corporations and organizations, according to its lawyers).

Wisconsin Right to Life argues that the blackouts prevented it from broadcasting ads in 2004 criticizing by name the state’s two Democratic senators, Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold, for filibustering Bush’s strict-constructionist judicial nominees–at a time when Feingold (the other named sponsor of McCain-Feingold, as it happens) was running for reelection. Although the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold on its face by a 5-4 vote in 2003 in a different lawsuit, Wisconsin Right to Life won a unanimous Supreme Court ruling last year allowing it to challenge the law’s application to specific instances and then persuaded a special three-judge federal district court in December that the blackout period unconstitutionally impinged upon Wisconsin Right to Life’s First Amendment right to engage in grassroots issue advocacy on behalf of its members.

All the documents in the WRTL case are linked here

At The Corner, Andy McCarthy comments briefly on McCain’s brief:

Worried about whether Giuliani is sincere about appointing originalist judges? Fair enough … but read McCain’s briefs. The Senator — who was instrumental in preventing a parliamentary reform to end Democratic filibusters against the Bush judicial nominees back when the Republicans had a sizable senate majority — apparently thinks it’s a violation of law if an interest group advocates in favor of originalist judicial nominees merely getting an up-or-down confirmation vote … at least if such advocacy would make it harder for pro-abortion incumbents like Senator Russ Feingold to be re-elected.

I’m not kidding. McCain contends (pp. 2-3 of the most recent brief) that Wisconsin Right to Life’s ads were objectionable because they were "express advocacy" and "explicit electioneering." And he actually elaborates as follows:

The undisputed facts demonstrate that the advertisements Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc. [(WRTL)] sought to broadcast in this case fall squarely into that [electioneering] category. All of WRTL’s ads denounced a “group of Senators” for filibustering judicial nominees and “causing gridlock” [me: The horror!]…; two of the ads emphasized that the Senators were “backing up some of our courts to a state of emergency[.]” … The ads then urged the audience to contact Senator Feingold—then a candidate for federal office [me: Can you imagine?]—and Senator Kohl to tell them to oppose the filibusters. … It was public knowledge that Feingold was one of the “group of Senators” to whom the ads referred. Indeed, WRTL itself had publicized Senator Feingold’s involvement in the filibusters (an important issue in the election) and called for his defeat on that ground. [me: How dare they!] Although the ads asked the audience to contact Senators Feingold and Kohl, they provided no contact information for them, instead directing viewers to a website criticizing them for their role in the filibusters. WRTL sought to run its ads immediately before the 2004 election (while Congress was in recess and no vote on the filibuster was imminent) [me: and when voters might have been paying the most attention to which senators were blocking pro-life judges] and did not run them after the election (when the filibuster controversy came to a head)….

If, as Ramesh asserts, Senator McCain seeks no further anti-free-speech legislation, one might suggest that this is because, having gotten his noxious law on the books, he can now resort more easily to Big Government’s best friend, the federal courts, to fill in the blanks — even if that means shutting down the political speech of pro-life groups.