I think Justice Kennedy’s argument in this opinion is the most important one he has ever penned, and I hope you will consult it again and again as Wisconsin Right To Life moves to a decision. Lots of commentators like to proclaim this or that case as the key one of this or that term, but I have to say, rarely have two relatively new justices faced such a choice as the one before you two in this matter. You can return American politics to the situation the Framers created and clearly intended, or you can endorse the hokum of 1976. The ill effects of the status quo are so tremendous that I hope you will join Justices Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas in a giant “Oops,” and return the right to say whatever an American wants to say, whenever he or she wants to say it, and at whatever cost he or she wants to spend back to the central position it enjoyed from 1789 until 1976.

Many of us share a respect for the caution that should inform all the Court’s work. Patience is a virtue, even when the law if badly off course and the need for correction urgent. I don’t often hope for the immediate repeal of thirty years of precedent. There are only two other areas in which I hope for such departures.

But if ever there was an occasion for a sharp break with a sad jurisprudential past, here it is, for restraints on political speech are restraints on the debate about all issues. Every single controversy is bound up in this one, and the error of Buckley is the error that touches every dimension of political life in America.

The political system that could otherwise be relied upon to bring about change via statute and amendment is itself trussed up by the incumbents who are in no hurry to restore competitiveness to the electoral landscape. The inmates are indeed running the asylum, and the challengers are locked out by the aftermath of Buckley.

We lost in 1976 the full and fair and absolutely free political debate that had been the legacy of the revolution. Bureaucrats arrived to replace candidates, editors and the public as judges of what could be said and by whom. The gag order entered then on every American has grown broader with each passing year as the inevitable distortions that follow a market restraint began to build and then spread. Now George Soros and his friends –who don’t mind hiring the lawyers and gaming the rules—are in the saddle, and the spontaneous speech that has long characterized American politics begins to erupt only to be tamped down by worries about registration, incorporation, reporting and safe harbors.

You two can change that, and with a very simple stroke of the pen. Simply declare that the First Amendment meant what it said, and if the public wants a different system for campaigns, the public will have to amend it.

If you do not join with Justices Kennedy, Scalia and Thomas now, the moment will pass. Once you embrace the Buckley fiction, you own the distortions –the tens of thousands of distortions—Buckley had bred. “You break it, you bought it,” is the old saying. You endorse contribution limits on some theory in 2007, it will be very difficult to walk away in the future. This is indeed a very unique moment. You two can change American politics for the better in an instant and without apology.

Clarity is a wonderful thing. Restore it to campaign finance, please. Send the incumbents on an equal footing to the people, and every candidate to their purses and their sponsors as equals. Return free speech to its place --first among equals in the rights guaranteed in the Bill named for Rights.