Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, June 29th.

This is your host Anastasia Glova.

Big decision issued by the Supreme Court earlier this week.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court dealt a huge blow Monday to the 2002 McCain-Feingold law

that prohibited targeted TV ads close to elections.

Commenting on the decision and its impact today is Cato's director of the Center for

Representative Government, John Samples.

Briefly, what was the question before the court in FEC versus Wisconsin right to life?

It was a case of a so-called as applied challenge which is the way McCain-Feingold was applied to a particular group which was the Wisconsin Right to Life group. They had tried to run some ads in 2004 that were essentially trying to get people to call Senator Russ Feingold, who was running for re-election in that year,

and they couldn't do it because they had accepted money from other corporations they were an incorporated

entity they were a corporation and those kinds of a corporation can't give money to campaigns

it can't have advertisements that directly advocate the

election or defeat of candidates. So Wisconsin Right to Life was out of luck. They

violated McCain-Feingold if they did grassroots lobbying.

Now the Supreme Court's decision to strike down provisions of McCain-Feingold appears to be a victory

for free political speech. So to what extent is this true?

It's certainly a victory for a political speech, but we're not sure how far it goes beyond just the case facts that we had before us of Wisconsin Right to Life and Grassroots lobbying.

They didn't formally strike down. Conson Right to Life and Grassroots lobbying.

They didn't formally strike down as unconstitutional

the part of McCain-Feingold that was at issue.

However, it looks like that Justice Roberts set out a test that will make it all but impossible

to actually use McCain-Feingold to suppress the kind of speech that these groups want to

...