The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday in a case involving the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, and touching on basic issues of freedom of speech and of the press.
I read about it in the New York Times in an article by Linda Greenhouse, whose credibility as an objective reporter of the Supreme Court’s doings was forever shredded, at least for me, by a speech she gave at Harvard last summer lamenting, among other things, the Right’s “sustained assault on women’s reproductive freedom and the hijacking of public policy by religious fundamentalism.”
Still, even if Greenhouse came out of the ideological closet in a way that makes a mockery of the Times’s posture of political neutrality, as best I can tell she did a creditable job in the basic task of laying out the facts of who said what in the case that was before the Court yesterday. The provision of McCain-Feingold in question, which prohibits certain kinds of advertisements just before an election, had been upheld by the Supremes by a margin of 5 to 4 in a December 2003 decision, which is now being revisited.
