Cite as: 540 U. S. 93 (2003)
Opinion of Kennedy, J.
not authorize Congress to decide what shapes and forms the national political dialogue is to take. To reach today's decision, the Court surpasses Buckley's limits and expands Congress' regulatory power. In so doing, it replaces discrete and respected First Amendment principles with new, amorphous, and unsound rules, rules which dismantle basic protections for speech.
A few examples show how BCRA reorders speech rights and codifies the Government's own preferences for certain speakers. BCRA would have imposed felony punishment on Ross Perot's 1996 efforts to build the Reform Party. Compare Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) §§ 309(d)(1)(A), 315(a)(1)(B), and 323(a)(1) (prohibiting, by up to five years' imprisonment, any individual from giving over $25,000 annually to a national party), with Spending By Perot, The Houston Chronicle, Dec. 13, 1996, p. 43, 1996 WL 11581440 (reporting Perot's $8 million founding contribution to the Reform Party). BCRA makes it a felony for an environmental group to broadcast an ad, within 60 days of an election, exhorting the public to protest a Congressman's impending vote to permit logging in national forests. See BCRA § 203. BCRA escalates Congress' discrimination in favor of the speech rights of giant media corporations and against the speech rights of other corporations, both profit and nonprofit. Compare BCRA § 203 with Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U. S. 652, 659-660 (1990) (first sanctioning this type of discrimination).
To the majority, all this is not only valid under the First Amendment but also is part of Congress' "steady improvement of the national election laws." Ante, at 117. We should make no mistake. It is neither. It is the codification of an assumption that the mainstream media alone can protect freedom of speech. It is an effort by Congress to ensure that civic discourse takes place only through the modes of its choosing. And BCRA is only the beginning, as its congressional proponents freely admit:
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