Hardly a clearer example could be imagined of the failure of our nation’s campaign speech regulation laws than the $775,000 fine the Federal Election Commission imposed against a left-wing group named America Coming Together. The case shows how our laws accomplish both too much and too little simultaneously — though, as believers in deregulation and the First Amendment, we contend that the “too much” far outweighs the “too little.”

Essentially, ACT, which is funded by, among others, George Soros and the Service Employees International Union, was found to have violated federal campaign-finance regulations by pretending during the 2004 election that many of its activities were aimed just at “getting out the vote,” as opposed to helping elect Senator Kerry or defeat President Bush. That this was a sham — as were such contentions by some, though not all, of the other 527s, on both sides of the political aisle — is a conclusion that many will say was plain to all who had eyes and ears.

So an argument could be made that the campaign-finance laws did too little. Everyone knew what was going on. ACT’s intentions were clear. As Byron York of National Review has reported, ACT set up shop at the Democratic National Convention; it sent out fundraising appeals detailing its “commitment to defeating George W. Bush”; it was working at the ground level to turn out Democratic voters. Yet, the FEC is only acting now.

That’s coming upon three years since the 2004 election ended. The election is over. ACT has all but disbanded, its allegedly illegal purpose served (even if it didn’t ultimately succeed). The only thing keeping ACT alive has been the legal wrangling with the FEC. The penalty the FEC has imposed after all of this? $775,000. That’s less than 1% of the $137 million ACT raised and spent for the 2004 election. If that’s the cost of breaking our nation’s election laws, then Mr. Soros and friends can consider their money well spent — just a cost of doing business.

We note all of this, however, not too attack Mr. Soros. It strikes us that our campaign-finance laws do so little because, at the end of the day, the American people have a sense of the injustice of it all. It’s wrong to fine a man for speaking and trying to influence an election in a democracy. It’s as wrong to do so when it’s Mr. Soros as when it’s any given Republican benefactor or interest group whom the press chooses to disdain.

What an irony that while Mr. Soros has the deep pockets to make a $775,000 fine amount to a slap on the wrist, he has dedicated a substantial sum, much of it through his Open Society Institute, to fighting to put in place the very type of regulations ACT has been found to have violated. While some big, well-funded groups can afford to flout the law, smaller groups are either intimidated from trying to speak or they are harassed out of business by political opponents who wield the regulations as weapons against citizen speech.

Let us not put too fine a point on it. These kinds of speech regulations are straight out of Orwell. They belong in communistic tyrannies. The abuse of these laws by the Federal Election Commission begs for attention from the Supreme Court or from the Congress. Everyone could be saved a lot of trouble, and our politics could be conducted more honestly, our democracy enriched and enlivened, if we had only one campaign-speech regulation, the one given to us from the Founders, who began it with the immortal words: Congress shall make no law.