John and Russ - You Been Had Boys, You Been Had!

Senators John McCain (he of the presidential wanna-be class) and Russ Feingold (he of the ... well, who knows!) have been had. Boy have they been had. John Fund, writing in today's Wall Street Journal notes that the whole "push" for campaign finance reform was a ruse set up mostly through the Pew Foundation & similar "liberal" groups:

"What Mr. Treglia revealed in a talk last year at the University of Southern California is that far from representing the efforts of genuine grass-roots activists, the campaign finance reform lobby was controlled and funded by liberal foundations like Pew. In a tape obtained by the New York Post, Mr. Treglia tells his USC audience they are going to hear a story he can reveal only now that campaign finance reform has become law. "The target audience for all this [foundation] activity was 535 people in [Congress]," Mr. Treglia says in his talk. "The idea was to create an impression that a mass movement was afoot. That everywhere [Congress] looked, in academic institutions, in the business community, in religious groups, in ethnic groups, everywhere, people were talking about reform."

"The media simply didn't think the involvement of liberal foundations in bankrolling campaign finance reform was a story. Mr. Treglia admits that "we had a scare" after George Will "stumbled across a report that we had done and attacked it in his column." But he said nothing came of it. "Journalists didn't care. . . . There was a panic there for a couple weeks, because we thought the story was going to begin to gather steam, and no one picked it up." And they easily could have. Mr. Treglia admitted that despite all the efforts to hide the attempt to deceive Congress about the true origins of the campaign finance reform lobby, "if any reporter wanted to know, they could have sat down and connected the dots. But they didn't."

"The successful stealth campaign by the eight liberal foundations means we now have to live in the Brave New World of McCain-Feingold. Bradley Smith, a Federal Election Commission member, made news this month by warning that bloggers could face federal regulation because a federal judge had thrown out their legal exemption from campaign finance regulations. The Internet has been burning up with concern that bloggers could be hauled into court for, as Mr. Smith puts it, "any decision by an individual to put a link [to a political candidate] on their home page, set up a blog, send out mass e-mails, any kind of activity that can be done." Mr. Smith warns that "it's very likely that the Internet is going to be regulated" by the FEC unless "Congress is willing to stand up and say, 'Keep your hands off of this, and we'll change the statute to make it clear.'"

McCain-Feingold did little in last year's elections to limit the influence of money in politics, but a great deal to benefit incumbents and harm true grass-roots politics. Its ban on using soft money to run issue ads in the 60 days before an election mean that such ads will run earlier, make campaigns longer and allow incumbents to avoid criticism of their voting records. David Mason, who serves with Mr. Smith on the FEC, says that the incredible complexity of the bill is likely to lead to "invidious enforcement, singling out disfavored groups or causes" and "subjecting regulated groups to harassment by political opponents."