Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act

The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA) is U.S. Congressional legislation which regulates the financing of political campaigns. It was also known as the McCain-Feingold bill, named after its chief sponsors, Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold.

As noted in a Supreme Court ruling on the BCRA, it was designed to address three issues:

The increased role of soft money in campaign financing,
The proliferation of issue ads, and
What were regarded as disturbing campaign practices during the federal elections of 1996, including (to some degree) the presidential race.

Court challenges

Provisions of the legislation were challenged as unconstitutional by groups such as the California State Democratic Party and the National Rifle Association, and individuals including Senator Mitch McConnell (Kentucky), the Republican Senate Majority Whip.

In June of 2003, the D.C. Court of Appeals issued a ruling on whether the law was constitutional. That ruling never took effect, as the case was immediately appealed to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a special session in September 2003. On Wednesday, December 10, 2003, it issued a complicated decision, totaling 300 pages in length, that with a 5-4 majority upheld the key provisions of McCain-Feingold.

Justice Breyer, Stevens, O'Connor, Souter, and Ginsburg established the majority for two parts of the Court's opinon:

With respect to Titles I and II of the BCRA, Justices Stevens, O'Connor wrote the opinion of the Court.
With respect to Title V of the BCRA, Justice Breyer wrote the Court's opinion.

A different 5-4 majority established the Court's opinion on the rest of the act:

With respect to Titles III and IV of the BCRA, four justices (O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Souter) joined Chief Justice Rehnquist, who wrote the opinion of the Court. The four remaining justices also joined most of the opinion.

Two dissenting opinions were included in the decision:

Justice Stevens, joined by Justices Ginsburg, and Breyer, dissented on one section of the part of the Court's opinion written by the Chief Justice.
The Chief Justice, joined by Justice Kennedy and Scalia, issued a 15-page dissent against the Court's opinion with respect to Titles I and V of the BCRA.

Three other justices wrote separate opinions on the decision:

Justice Kennedy, joined by the Chief Justice, issued a 68-page opinion and appendix, noting that BCRA forces "speakers to abandon their own preference for speaking through parties and organizations."
Justice Thomas issued a separate 25-page opinion noting that the Court was upholding the "most significant abridgment of the freedoms of speech and association since the Civil War."
Justice Scalia issued a separate 19-page opinion, a "few words of [his] own," because of the "extraordinary importance" of the cases.

This article is not a stub, but needs work, such as descriptions of the Titles of the BCRA. You can help Wikipedia by fixing it.