New York’s City Council doesn’t often come across as more reasonable than lawmakers in Washington, but a recent move may be an exception. The City Council approved last month, and the mayor let slide into law last week, a bill to make it easier for unions to contribute to city campaigns, a measure the mayor last week declined to veto. For all its flaws, the new law still manages to expand free speech in campaigns, albeit only for a select few. Congress, meantime, spent the weekend considering a provision that would dramatically limit political speech before House leaders mercifully dropped the issue. Both these stories taken together demonstrate that regulating speech under the guise of campaign finance “reform” is nothing more than a glorified incumbent protection racket.

The council has put a law on the books counting some branches of unions as individual contributors. The new law allows those affiliates to contribute despite an earlier Campaign Finance Board ruling that all the affiliates of an umbrella group together counted as a single source under the rules. Thanks to the new law, the flood of union money in city politics will go on as before. The law’s most significant outcome may be that the health care workers’ union, Local 1199, and a building union, 32BJ, will still be allowed to make individual contributions although they are both affiliates of the Service Employees International Union. The law is a transparent effort by a predominantly Democratic City Council to preserve its most deep-pocketed source of campaign funds, but at least it eases a restriction on campaigning, which is always a good thing.

Not so in Congress. Some House Republicans tried over the weekend to regulate so-called 527 groups by inserting an amendment into the conference report on a Defense Department authorization act, meaning that representatives and senators wouldn’t have had a chance to defeat the provision before having to vote on the entire bill. The groups, which can’t coordinate their efforts with candidates and currently operate free from most campaign finance rules, are one of the few remaining avenues for people to voice political views. Ever since 527s rose to prominence in the 2004 presidential campaign – Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was a notable example – they have been the bane of the speech-regulation crowd, although slipping “reform” through on the sly proved too much even for some of the most ardent reformers; one group, Democracy21, supports 527 restrictions but decried this secretive way of trying to enact them.

While the City Council in New York managed to enact a good measure almost despite themselves, Congress was in danger of veering even further toward restricting speech. Neither case has much to do with lawmakers wanting to do the right thing. New Yorkers are just lucky that in this particular case, the self-interest of City Council members happens to coincide with protecting, even by just a half-step, the First Amendment. If that isn’t an argument against campaign finance “reform,” we don’t know what is. Next let the City Council give corporations the right to make contributions and count contributions for corporate divisions separately, just like unions. The constitutional guarantee of free speech should apply all the time, not just when it’s convenient for lawmakers to let a select group of Americans participate in the political process.