Tomorrow is my first Torts exam, and I can't sleep. I keep waking up. So I thought, "What the hell, the Supremes just released their newest bestseller, McConnell v. Federal Election Commission. That must be good for a snoozeathon."

It almost made me cry. After this semester, I have Constitutional Law, and this Supreme Court is not helping. Others have commented on the fact that the Supremes have adopted the J. K. Rowling school of plot development (the summary is 19 pages long). Few have mentioned the sheer Lovecraftian complexity of the decision itself--merely glancing over it may drive sane readers, particularly non-lawyers mad.

STEVENS and O'CONNOR, JJ., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to BCRA Titles I and II, in which SOUTER, GINSBURG, and BREYER, JJ., joined. REHNQUIST, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to BCRA Titles III and IV, in which O'CONNOR,SCALIA, KENNEDY, and SOUTER, JJ., joined, in which STEVENS, GINSBURG, and BREYER, JJ., joined except with respect to BCRA �305, and in which THOMAS, J., joined with respect to BCRA ��304, 305, 307, 316, 319, and 403(b). BREYER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court with respect to BCRA Title V, in which STEVENS, O'CONNOR, SOUTER, and GINSBURG, JJ., joined. SCALIA, J., filed an opinion concurring with respect to BCRA Titles III and IV, dissenting with respect to BCRA Titles I and V, and concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in
part with respect to BCRA Title II. THOMAS, J., filed an opinion concurring with respect to BCRA Titles III and IV, except for BCRA ��311 and 318, concurring in the result with respect to BCRA �318, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part with respect to BCRA Title II, and dissenting with respect to BCRA Titles I, V, and �311, in which opinion SCALIA, J., joined as to Parts I, II�A, and II�B. KENNEDY, J., filed an opinion concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in
part with respect to BCRA Titles I and II, in which REHNQUIST, C. J., joined, in which SCALIA, J., joined except to the extent the opinion upholds new FECA �323(e) and BCRA �202, and in which THOMAS, J., joined with respect to BCRA �213. REHNQUIST, C. J., filed an opinion dissenting with respect to BCRA Titles I and V, in which SCALIA and KENNEDY, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed an opinion dissenting with respect to BCRA �305, in which GINSBURG and BREYER, JJ., joined.

Can we just sum up what got us this far, in 2AM generalization terms?
(1) The Supreme Court, in decisions before and after Buckley, managed to studiously avoid making bright-line decisions regarding where one could, and couldn't, violate freedom of speech. This led to further laws with sometimes smaller, but often more numerous, loopholes.
(2) Congress passed a campaign finance law that various members of the Senate knew full well had unconstitutional provisions. The bill became larded with provisions good for naked partisan advantage on both sides, and especially useful for the one political party (incumbents) that does particularly well out of revised laws. The bill itself bloomed into a monstrosity.
(3) It went back through the court system, metastasizing into a beast that only a by-the-hour litigator, a con-law professor, or a paper manufacturer could love. (I seem to recall that the District Court decision leading to this was longer than the Lord of the Rings, but might actually have had too little content for a Hollywood script.) Finally, it landed on the Supremes, who rather than shipping the whole thing back to Capitol Hill in a box with a message saying, "Call us when you stop speaking Delphic," decided to blur further whatever lines they'd drawn before this. They managed this so well that it seems O'Connor and Rehnquist may have switched sides. It's an open bet if this was intentional, or if they just got confused.
(4) Having managed to stretch the relatively terse 1st Amendment ("Congress shall make no law") into Harry Potter and the Legislation of Sisyphus, we may now look forward to several hundred lawyers on every campaign in the country searching for ways to narrow or expand fundraising and advertising methodologies to get around the new set of rules. These methods will be tested in the courts, in law reviews, and most importantly, on us every time we turn on the TV.

Oh joy.

UPDATE: Good Scalia dissent, though. If you don't feel like paging through the huge PDF, check out Crescat's excerpt:

The federal election campaign laws, which are already (as today's opinions show) so voluminous, so detailed, so complex, that no ordinary citizen dare run for office, or even contribute a significant sum, without hiring an expert advisor in the field, can be expected to grow more voluminous, more detailed, and more complex in the years to come-- and always, always, with the objective of reducing the excessive amount of speech.