An appellate court has upheld the decision by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly forcing the FEC to regulate Internet speech as part of the BCRA:

An appeals court agreed Friday that federal election regulators wrongly opened several loopholes in the new campaign finance law meant to take big contributions out of elections.

The federal appeals court in Washington affirmed U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's 2004 ruling striking down several FEC regulations interpreting the 2002 campaign finance law and ordering the commission to write tougher rules.

The lower court judge struck down 15 commission regulations. The FEC asked the appeals court to overrule her on five of them, but lost its bid Friday in a 2-1 ruling.

We find yet another judge who cannot determine the meaning of "Congress shall pass no law ..." To be fair, this appeal was not on the BCRA itself but on Kollar-Kotelly's ruling on a lawsuit brought by Congressmen Shays and Meehan that complained the FEC had improperly enforced it. Still, one would hope that at some point a judge would look at the underlying rot at the core of the BCRA and stand up for free political speech.

Oddly, Yahoo News attached a photo of John McCain to this story giving a thumbs-up, while the caption reads, "Republican Senator John McCain, seen here 22 June 2005, voted against the legislation and said..." It gives the impression that McCain voted agains the BCRA. Readers have to click on the link to discover that the rest of the caption refers to a spending bill. I wonder what Yahoo's editors were thinking.

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