Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Bloggers are taking on Rep. Christopher Shays over his proposal that campaign-finance rules apply to political Web sites. Operators of political weblogs accused Shays, who has long promoted campaign-finance reform, of seeking to restrict free speech. The liberal http://www.dailykos.com and conservative http://www.redstate.org urged readers to speak out, insisting that online activists should not have to worry about inadvertently running afoul of campaign-finance laws when they are expressing their opinions on the Internet. Last week, Congress took up a bill that would have exempted the Internet from campaign-finance regulations. Shays, R-Conn., and Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass., lobbied supporters of...

The full District of Columbia Court of Appeals has declined the Federal Election Commission's (FEC's) final appeal to save major campaign-finance regulations it wrote after the reform law was enacted in 2002. This leaves the agency little choice but to rewrite the rules governing political activity. The FEC had delayed implementing its new rules in the hope that the full circuit court of appeals would reverse two decisions striking them down. Now those rulings will stand unless the case unexpectedly goes to the Supreme Court. The FEC is expected to implement at least eight new sets of regulations during this...