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What bill are you talking about?
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McCain-Feingold. Yet another in a long line of Incumbent Protection Acts.
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I think you are wrong.
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See
The Speech Police (WSH June 27 - you may need a subscription to WSJ online to view the link).
Some excerpts:
In February 2006, Norm Feck learned that the city of Parker, Colo., was considering annexing his unincorporated neighborhood, Parker North. Realizing that it would mean more bureaucracy, Mr. Feck and five other locals wrote letters to the editor, handed out information sheets, formed an Internet discussion group, and printed up anti-annexation yard signs that sprouted throughout the neighborhood.
Annexation supporters responded with a legal complaint against Mr. Feck and his friends for violating Colorado's campaign-finance laws. The suit also threatened anyone who had contacted Mr. Feck's group about the annexation, or put up one of their yard signs, with "investigation, scrutinization, and sanctions for Campaign Finance violations." Apparently the anti-annexation activists hadn't registered with the state, or filled out the required paperwork disclosing their expenditures on time. In February of this year voters defeated the annexation proposal -- but Mr. Feck and others still face steep fines. The case remains in litigation. [not directly related to McCain-Feingold]
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During the 2000 presidential race, four men placed a homemade sign, reading VOTE REPUBLICAN: NOT AL GORE SOCIALISM, on a cotton trailer along a Texas highway. The FEC spent nearly 18 months investigating, because the sign lacked the legally required information about who had paid for it. In 2004, Nascar driver Kirk Shelmerdine spent $50 to affix a BUSH-CHENEY '04 decal to an unsold spot on his car's advertising space. The FEC admonished him for making an unreported campaign expenditure.
Such cases are not merely examples of bureaucratic excess, points out campaign-finance lawyer Bob Bauer, a lonely pro-freedom voice in Democratic circles: Under today's intrusive laws, Mr. Shelmerdine's activities demanded an FEC inquiry. Nor are such cases rare.
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Though they claim to speak for average citizens, reformers don't care much about the way their reforms hurt those citizens. Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center and a McCain adviser, has dismissed complaints by arguing that campaign-finance laws are no more complex than antitrust or patent laws. "They are worth the inconvenience and lawyers' fees they generate," says Mr. Potter -- who also heads the campaign-finance practice at the law firm of Caplin & Drysdale, where partner billing rates can range upward of $750 per hour.
Another disturbing trend in campaign-finance regulation is the attempt to directly regulate speech. For example, in the Shelmerdine case, the FEC valued the driver's "contribution" not at the $50 it cost him to place a decal on his car, but at several thousand dollars -- what the FEC determined to be the advertising spot's monetary value.
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"I have come to doubt that the masses of the people have sense enough to govern themselves," wrote Ben Tillman, the founder of federal campaign-finance reform, in 1916. Many years later, in 1997, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt famously described the battle over campaign-finance reform as "two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy. You can't have both."