Federal campaign laws — intended, said the authors McCain and Feingold, to “clean up” politics — were the convenient means whereby the Bush-Gonzales Justice Department tried to end the career of a decent and honorable individual, Siegelman, who happened to be in the “other” political tribe.

There are, unfortunately, lots of laws like McCain-Feingold which sound good when explained in 30 second soundbites, but which open the door to all kinds of government-sponsored mischief, such as political prosecutions. Also unfortunately, the left has signed on to many such laws intoxicated with notion that all we have to do to clean up politics is make practically every purely political activity illegal.

As Don Siegelman’s case shows, the road to hell is in fact paved with good intentions.

The best approach to campaign finance reform would be to simply require that all candidates and committees report all contributions, by contributors’ names and amounts, in real time on universally accessible websites. No legal limits on who contributes how much, etc. That public disclosure, ongoing and daily on the web, would work much good.

Or, we can keep laws on the books that allow crooked prosecutors to ambush good elected office holders for 100% political purposes.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.