Anyone who still thinks campaign finance regulations improve our politics should have been sitting in a Washington, D.C., courtroom on Monday morning. A three-judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court for the D.C. Circuit heard arguments in Hagelin v. FEC, a case that hinges on how the government regulates presidential elections.

John Hagelin and his co-plaintiffs (a list that includes Ralph Nader, Patrick Buchanan, and the Green Party, among others) charge that the Federal Election Commission has not done a good enough job of policing the Commission for Presidential Debates, the nonpartisan, nonprofit corporation that has sponsored the debates since 1988. As a result of alleged partisan bias, the CPD kept third-party candidates out of the debating halls in 2000 and kept Ralph Nader off the stage in 2004.

Mr. Hagelin et al. argue that the Commission for Presidential Debates might not be “partisan,” but it is certainly “bi-partisan.” The commission was founded in 1987 by the Republican and Democratic parties, and as a result, these plaintiffs argue, is biased against members of third parties. The FEC is supposed to care about this because, since CPD is supposedly nonpartisan, it operates within a special category of political organization that is free from many of the contribution limits and reporting requirements that apply to candidates, parties, or other political groups.

The Hagelin case turns on a procedural issue – whether the FEC investigated charges of bias at the Commission for Presidential Debates carefully enough – but it raises a question: Why is the government in the business of regulating who can sponsor presidential debates to begin with? The Commission for Presidential Debates is, after all, a private corporation, but given the degree to which the FEC sets the ground rules for how it operates, it’s just a hair’s breadth from the government. Which means that what looks to some like a part of the federal government, albeit a supposedly nonpartisan part, is deciding which political speech will and won’t be aired in the run-up to presidential elections.

If Americans had one fear in mind when they ratified the First Amendment, surely this is it. The Hagelin case, and the CPD for that matter, are only symptoms of the problem with campaign finance “reforms.” If we didn’t try so strenuously to regulate campaign cash, there wouldn’t have to be exceptions for, and restrictions on, organizations that want to sponsor debates. It would also be easier for anyone to try to sponsor a debate, and no one would be suing over alleged political bias on the part of the one organization that has cornered the debate market with assistance from campaign finance regulations and the FEC.

Instead, decades of concerted effort to make the system fairer and more transparent have led to a sparsely attended hearing in a Washington courthouse where three judges consider the legality of a procedure for determining the legality of an ostensibly private, but arguably quasi-governmental, corporation that controls how our would-be presidents come into our living rooms in the waning days of the campaign. This is progress? If the presidential candidates of the leading parties want to debate Ralph Nader, it’s fine by us. If they don’t, it’s also fine with us. Maybe the Hagelin plaintiffs would be invited to debates under a freer system, and maybe they wouldn’t. But at least then no one would be able to claim that anyone was gaming the campaign finance laws to stifle free speech.