Senators McCain and Feingold, champions of the regulation of campaign speech, sent out a letter Monday warning of what they reckon is a serious threat to the current system. They are worried about a provision that has been slipped into a housing and transportation appropriations bill that would allow political action committees associated with incumbents – and only incumbents – to siphon unlimited funds to a national party committee. These funds could then be pumped back into that member’s campaign, the senators warn, “effectively subverting individual and PAC donor contribution limits on the amounts that can be given to a Member’s campaign.”

This is a case of the senators becoming alarmed that the Congress has become alarmed over the bind that tight campaign finance laws – of which McCain-Feingold is only the most recent – have put them in. No sooner did the Congress realize that, than it began trying to expand a potential loophole in the rules. We agree that the limits are too tight on incumbents. But the better way to rectify this would be to let the political action committees of incumbents do whatever they want – and extend those liberties to all other Americans, with or without political action committees.

The problem with campaign speech regulation is that there will always be a hunt for loopholes – money is like water. The leadership PAC “loophole” was a predictable product of earlier campaign finance laws, and McCain-Feingold has only created one more loophole after another. Just in the past 12 months, proponents of speech regulation have gone on the attack against so-called 527 groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and MoveOn.org. The politicians fear that Internet blogs will permit people to communicate in ways the Congress can’t control, so they want to regulate them, too. Now they are trying to hold the line against leadership PACs. Closing each loophole would require taking another little bite out of the First Amendment. Where will this dike plugging exercise end?

Feature what’s happening in England, where something with the Orwellian name of the Office of Communications decided that TV spots bought by the Make Poverty History campaign were “political” and thus prohibited under a decades-old ban on political advertising. The ads were not partisan, but encouraged viewers to petition their government to do more about world poverty. The ruling in Britain was based on telecom laws and not campaign finance regulations, but it is an example of how once the government starts regulating political speech, it’s on a slippery slope. Regulations breed loopholes that breed ever more restrictive rules to close them, and those restrictions breed even more loopholes and less transparency.