Outside the Beltway

WILE E. MCCAIN

James Joyner · Monday, September 8, 2003 · 1 comment

OpinionJournal has an amusing lead editorial comparing the lovable cartoon character with the grumpy Senator:

The tragedy of Wile E. Coyote isn’t that he never caught the Road Runner but that he failed to understand that he never could catch him. As it hears the weighty Constitutional arguments for and against campaign finance reform today, the U.S. Supreme Court could do worse than keep in mind that cartoon parable.

That’s because even as the Justices attempt to make sense of a divided lower court’s 1,700-page review of last year’s McCain-Feingold bill, the reform itself is already imploding from its own illogic. Listen closely to the reformers themselves, who are already suing the Federal Election Commission for allegedly not enforcing the law adequately.

They’re also busy writing new reforms that are supposed to fill the holes in the supposedly epic reforms they just passed. And billionaires like George Soros are donating millions of dollars to new political groups that are designed expressly to go around or through the holes in the latest reforms. As the Road Runner would say, “Beep, Beep!”