Enjoy reading your newspaper while you can, because the House of Representatives demonstrated yesterday that lawmakers are perfectly content to whittle away at the free speech rights of any who disagree with them, bit by bit. That’s about the most positive spin one could put on their vote to extend political speech restrictions to so-called 527 groups, which had become the last refuge of the First Amendment after passage of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or McCain-Feingold. Now Republicans, who should know better, have shown that speech regulation in the name of campaign finance “reform” is the last refuge of scoundrels.

McCain-Feingold severely curtailed the rights of Americans to express their political views by donating to their preferred parties. Such “soft money” donations had become popular after earlier Congresses all but eliminated the right of Americans to donate directly to candidates. After soft money, Americans turned to 527 groups, named for the section of the tax code under which they are incorporated. These groups could buy advertising for “issues,” but could not explicitly endorse or support particular candidates. In other words, campaign finance “reformers” succeeded in making campaigns about everything except candidates. But even that was too much for some in Congress, who object to any political speech they can’t control. Up rose the cry to “solve” the 527 “problem.”

If there is a problem here, it is lawmakers’ stubborn refusal to see that campaign speech regulation doesn’t work. Congress has been trying since Watergate to remove the “corrupting” influence of money from politics. Money, like water, has just found new paths around obstacles put in its way. Regulation of “hard money” donations to candidates led to soft money. Elimination of soft money led to 527s. And all along, the result has been to make the process less transparent. Instead of flowing to candidates whom voters could hold accountable at the ballot box, in 2004, campaign money flowed through and to shadowy organizations the aims of which weren’t always clear. That doesn’t bother us so much, but considering how we got into this mess, only a Congressman could think that more regulation would be the way to get out of it.

Yesterday’s vote also highlights how there is nothing principled about the way campaign finance “reform” gets pushed through Congress. The House’s attempt to restrict 527 groups was perpetrated by the same Republican majority that did its best to oppose Mc-Cain-Feingold in 2002. It’s hard to escape the suspicion that their newfound zeal for speech restrictions arises from the fact that, so far at least, liberals have been more successful at harnessing the power of 527s – by one count, Democratic 527s like that run by the folks at MoveOn.org raised three times as much as Republican groups in the last cycle and did so from all sorts of fat cats, most famously George Soros.

Republicans are supposed to be the stalwarts of individual freedom, but apparently where freedom of speech is concerned, incumbency trumps principle. Such could be the refrain of the campaign speech regulation chorus that periodically tunes up on Capitol Hill. The good news is that Democrats in the Senate might yet be able to stop this bill before it goes any further. In which case, if we’re lucky, Republicans will channel their distaste for Mr. Soros and MoveOn.org into a bill to “fix” 527s the right way – by allowing more money, and thus more speech, back into other parts of the political process.