The Washington Post editorial board calls a provision that would exempt the Internet from campaign-finance laws a “cyber loophole” that should remain closed. This is the same fight that been joined on the left by the Daily Kos and on the right by Red State, not to mention many other bloggers and free-speech advocates who are fighting to keep the speech police out of cyberspace.

The Washington Post, like others who argue for more restrictive campaign-finance laws, think it’s the job of the Federal Elections Commission and the courts to strike a balance between “corruption or the appearance of corruption” and the First Amendment:

In its first crack at this difficult issue after the passage of the new campaign finance law, the FEC concluded — unwisely, we thought, as a matter of legal interpretation and sensible policy — to take a hands-off approach to the Internet. Slapped down by a federal judge, the agency is rewriting its rules in a way that promises both to protect the free-speech rights of bloggers and to subject Internet advertising to the same rules as those governing other media. There’s no need for Congress to interfere with this process — and great peril in its doing so in this broad-brush fashion.

The great peril actually comes from the criminalization of speech and politics as campaign-finance regulation grows more and more onerous. My article in the current print NR talks about how this criminalization is what has enabled Texas DA Ronnie Earle, a Democrat, to prosecute nearly everyone involved in the 2002 Republican takeover of Texas politics — not just Tom DeLay. As I mention in the article, at one point the Texas Association of Business, which Earle indicted just weeks before he indicted DeLay, found itself with unusual political bedfellows when the ACLU and the League of United Latin American Citizens came to its defense. They realize, as all who value free speech should, that it could be a Republican prosecutor coming after them next time.

Congress is right to pass a provision exempting the Internet from campaign-finance laws. The blogosphere should remain a free zone for political speech in order to maintain the vibrancy it exhibited in the last election.