A tip of the hat is in order to the president and chief executive officer of the New York Times Company, Russell Lewis, for the principled op-ed piece he published Tuesday in the Washington Post. Mr. Lewis called on the Supreme Court to strike down the provision in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law that would, as Mr. Lewis put it, effectively ban “broadcast ads paid for by nonprofit groups and others when the ads refer to a specified candidate and run within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary.” Mr. Lewis called the restriction “insidious” and “inconsistent with the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and a free press.” He noted further that the restriction applies “precisely when public comment on those who hold or seek public office is most important.”

Mr. Lewis’s position sets him at odds with the crusade by the New York Times Company’s flagship national newspaper, the Times. As recently as March 19, the Times issued an editorial dismissing as a “fallacy” the notion that the McCain-Feingold bill restricts free speech. Mr. Lewis follows the lead of the Times’s most famous First Amendment lawyer, Floyd Abrams of Cahill, Gordon & Reindel, who has also been making the case that the McCain-Feingold law is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. “Think of it,” Mr. Abrams said the other day. “A statute that bars ads by the NRA or the Sierra Club within 60 days of a general election because they refer to a candidate by name.… From start to finish, the new law seems rooted in the notion that speech about elections is so dangerous that it must be rationed or quarantined. That approach simply cannot be squared with the First Amendment.”

With both the Times’s top executive and its most honored First Amendment sage calling the law unconstitutional, the position the newspaper has been advancing in its editorials is looking less tenable by the hour. As for Mr. Lewis, this is not the first time he has gone public with his dissent from the liberal group-think that obtains at Times Square. In March 2001, Mr. Lewis gave a speech suggesting that “the growing likelihood of a tax cut” made it realistic to anticipate that the economy would begin to bounce back. This was the same tax cut that his own newspaper’s editorials were deriding at the time as “unlikely to be of immediate help to the economy.” It all leaves us wondering why Mr. Lewis’s perspective is so different from those of the editors of the newspaper published by the company he heads. Maybe it’s because Mr. Lewis has a business to run and they don’t.