Not explicitly, but as far as I’m concerned the Supreme Court’s ruling has opened up a loophole big enough to drive a truck through. Say goodbye to our brief little period of political honesty.

By 5 to 4, the court ruled that an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin should have been allowed to broadcast ads before the 2004 race for the United States Senate in that state. In its ruling today, the high court opened a significant loophole in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, familiarly known as the McCain-Feingold law, to curb donations to campaigns.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said that, when regulating what can be said in a campaign and when it may be said, “the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it.”

A big piece of McCain-Feingold was that so-called “issue ads” that actually mentioned candidates could not be used within 60 days of an election or 30 days within a primary. The reasoning is pretty obvious. Let them make ads about issues themselves, but prevent sideways contributions to candidates. Otherwise a candidate could simply promise a given group favors once elected and said group suddenly starts a marketing blitz attacking the other guy. Consider it a form of soft money that never involves money exchanging parties.

So the Wisconsin Right-to-Life group makes an ad that pretty much explicitly breaks the language of the law, making an ad that “urged viewers to contact” Feingold and Herb Kohl, and the SCOTUS decides that this doesn’t really count as political advocacy since, apparently, it didn’t mention anything about voting. Hell of a loophole, that.

Who decided to uphold this near-refutation of the law in favor of an anti-abortion ad?

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion upholding the special court. Siding with him were Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, although the last three jurists would have gone further and declared the pertinent section of the law unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito said only that the anti-abortion group’s ads should not have been banned under the section.

Ah… now I understand. Wonder what would have happened if it was a pro-choice group, or an anti-war group asking viewers to “ask president Bush why he’s throwing American lives away” or something to that effect.