When Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” law last year and President Bush said he’d sign it, advocates of the bill hailed a new era. The Washington Post, in an editorial headlined “Victory for Reform,” wrote, “It’s taken years of effort to shut the loophole that allowed ‘soft money’ donations from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals to swamp the legal barriers that were supposed to keep such big-money contributions out of federal campaigns.… legislators cast a vote that will rightly be read as an attempt to restore some balance to the political system, to limit the extent to which people and interests with money are able to exert indecently more influence than those without.”

The bill’s leading opponent, Senator McConnell, offered a radically different assessment of the bill’s effect. Speaking on the Senate floor, the Republican of Kentucky noted that the bill “eviscerates the national party committees.” Then he asked, “Where will all the soft money go? Where will it all go?” And he answered his own question, “It is going to go to outside groups.” He summed up, “Let’s go over that one more time. We are taking this money away from the parties, shifting it to outside groups…there won’t be any less soft money raised around here. My prediction is there will be more soft money around. It will just be raised for outside groups rather than for the party.…This bill does not take money out of politics, it just takes the parties out of politics.”

It’s still early in the 2004 election cycle, which, barring an intervention by the Supreme Court to strike down the law, is the first that will be run under the McCain-Feingold rules. But the weekend brought some early evidence that Mr. McConnell was right and the campaign finance “reformers” were wrong. It came in the form of an Associated Press dispatch that began “Making a major foray into partisan politics, multibillionaire George Soros is committing $10 million to a new Democratic leaning group aimed at defeating President Bush next year.”

So much for shutting the “loophole,” under which, the Washington Post had complained, “people and interests with money are able to exert indecently more influence than those without.” Mr. Soros’s reported $10 million pledge dwarfs the size of the contributions that were made under the system before it was “reformed” by Senators McCain and Feingold. Back in the 1999–2000 election cy cle, the largest soft money contribution was $6,463,600 from the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, according to Common Cause, a pro-“reform” group. Common Cause included contributions from Afscme affiliates and individual Afscme employees as part of its tabulation. Most other top donors in the 1999–2000 cycle — even mega-donors like S. Daniel Abraham and Haim Saban — didn’t approach the $2 million mark, even using Common Cause’s expansive definitions.

So this is the “victory for reform” — Mr. Soros can’t give anywhere near a sum like $10 million to the Democratic Party, but he can spend it on his own on a “Democratic-leaning group aimed at defeating President Bush next year.”

Advocates of the socalled reform argue that there is less threat of “corruption” when Mr. Soros spends on his own rather than giving to the party. At least this way, they argue, elected officials aren’t involved in the solicitations. But our elected officials read the newspapers, too,

and it would have to be a pretty dense Democratic president who woke up in the White House and was somehow unaware of the help that Mr. Soros’s $10 million provided to get him there. Somehow we doubt Mr. Soros would have much trouble getting his phone calls returned.

Moreover, it takes a cynic indeed to think that it’s less corrupting to the republic to have billionaires spending political money on their own, rather than in the context of national political parties, which, after all, are, for all their faults, committees made up mostly of elected officials or of people appointed by elected officials.

This newspaper fully supports Mr. Soros’s right to spend his money on the independent anti-Bush group. We even welcome it to the degree that it helps break down the notion that Mr. Bush is the candidate of the rich, opposed by the working classes. But the First Amendment to the Constitution gives Mr. Soros the right to give the money to a political party, too. It’s still unclear whether the Supreme Court will side with that interpretation of the First Amendment or whether it will uphold the McCain-Feingold ban that restricts the First Amendment rights of Mr. Soros and all the rest of us. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in that case, known as McConnell v. FEC, on September 8. Mr. McConnell’s perspicacity in predicting the effects of the bill is something for the justices to remember as they weigh his arguments in the First Amendment case that bears his name.