The End of Political Blogging?

The blogosphere is buzzing with commentary in response to this quote from Federal Elections Commission member Bradley Smith: "The freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over." he goes on further to say:

In just a few months, he warns,
bloggers and news organizations
could risk the wrath of the
federal government if they
improperly link to a campaign's
Web site. Even forwarding a
political candidate's press
release to a mailing list,
depending on the details, could
be punished by fines.

Smith, one of the three Republican members of the commission is referring to one possible effect of applying provisions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) to the Internet. Needless, to say, political bloggers are quite upset. What's particularly annoying about this is that it is the Democratic members of the commission who primarily seem to want to go along with this abridgement of the free speech of the Internet community. *sigh*, we have had to show policymakers before that the First Amendment applies to the Internet by taking them all the way to the Supreme Court, so I suppose we can do it again. (Disclosure: I was a co-plaintiff in a Supreme Court case which struck down the Communications Decency Act of 1996.)