Word: alito
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...well preserve the overall impact of McCain-Feingold and doesn't necessarily justify predictions of the end to spending restraint. As with the Bong Hits case, it also starts to show the ideological limits of the Roberts Court, where the President's two appointees, Roberts and Samuel Alito, are less open to sweeping legal change than their counterparts on the right, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas...
...Joined by Justice Samuel Alito, Roberts says the organization's ads could reasonably be seen as opposing the practice of filibustering, rather than the candidacy of Feingold, so they therefore past constitutional muster. (Wisconsin Right to Life won't use the old ads, obviously, but at least now it knows what it can say in new ones.) It's only when an ad is "susceptible of no reasonable interpretation other than as an appeal to vote for or against a specific candidate" that McCain-Feingold kicks in, Roberts says...
...Things could have turned out a lot worse for friends of McCain-Feingold, because three justices - Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Anthony Kennedy - wanted to go farther than Roberts and Alito by reversing the 2003 decision and striking down all the statute?s restrictions on ads, including the ban on ads advocating a specific candidate shortly before an election...
...That brings up an important point. As the court's term draws to a close, it becomes increasingly clear that Roberts and Alito - Bush's two selections for the court - are far different from Scalia and Thomas. As Cass Sunstein, the constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago, describes them, Scalia and Thomas are "visionaries:" justices with a clear view of the Constitution's meaning and an equally clear sense of how they want the law to change. They write or join dissenting or concurring opinions - like the one in this case, or the one that calls for reversing...
...Meanwhile, in another concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, sides with Roberts, but they fret about anyone construing his opinion too broadly. It's all right, they say, for schools to crack down on speech about drugs, because drugs can be a real threat to student safety. But in their view, that's about as extreme a restriction as the First Amendment allows. Roberts' opinion "provides no support," they say, "for any restriction of speech that can plausibly be interpreted as commenting on any political or social issue...