Laws are not justified by which party they empower. Bush said this law was unconstitutional, a large majority of republicans agreed with him. He campaigned on a promise to veto it, he lied.
"Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.There are two clauses of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion; there is not only a "free exercise" clause but a an "Establishment" clause. The courts have indeed evinced an unfortunate tendency to read the "Establishment" clause expansively as to threaten to extinguish the "free exercise" clause. By the internal logic of the Constitution, "freedom of speech, and of the press" likewise implies freedom from an Establishment as well as freedom from censorship, even if the framers did not trouble to make the two aspects of freedom explicit.
But although we-the-people are vigilant that the goverrnment shall not act in judgement upon the press by censoring the press, we are almost entirely oblivious to the opposite abuse, government Establishment. There are officially objective bodies empanneled by the American legal system--they're called juries, and no other body is constitutionally authorized to the claim of "truth" with government sanction. Yet all "campaign finance reform" legislation essentially Establishes the commercial press by banning "political speech" by we-the-people within a certain time before an election while excuding establishment journalism from the definition of political speech.
The same is in fact true the year around, when it comes to broadcasting; the selection of the few to be allowed to speak is accomplished at the expense of the equality of we-the-people who do not have government license to speak.
Although admittedly the framers hoped to avoid political parties ("faction"), the logic of the Constitution has driven American politics into an essentially stable "2-major-party, multiple-minor-party" configuration. The prototypes of the modern American political parties were newspapers--essentially, house organs for the Jefferson/Hamilton factions.
The propaganda "PR" of the modern pseudo-objective liberal newspaper claims that those house organs were somehow scandalous, but that point completely escaped the notice of the founders who had no illusion that newspapers were, should be, or even could be "objective." "Freedom of the press" implies judgement of the truth/significance of journalism (and indeed of all printed matter) by we-the-people individually and not by the government.
Everyone who voted for McCain-Feingold, and the president who signed it, is guilty of malfeasance because the "law" so patently intends what the First Amendment forbids.
Why Broadcast Journalism is
Unnecessary and Illegitimate