The Supreme Court dealt a huge blow to the McCain-Feingold campaign finance act today, loosening “the restrictions on what companies and unions can spend on television advertisements just before elections.” The Republican co-sponsor of the act, John McCain, wasn’t pleased, saying, “It is regrettable that a split Supreme Court has carved out a narrow exception by which some corporate and labor expenditures can be used to target a federal candidate in the days and weeks before an election.”

Others on the right, unsurprisingly, are more upbeat. John Tabin at The American Spectator feels the ruling is a microcosm of McCain’s difficulties: “The Court’s shift to the right sometimes seems like the only thing in the Bush era that conservatives are actually happy about. Discontent with that rightward shift is a losing position in a Republican primary.”

“This is a victory for free speech, but the court didn’t go far enough in my opinion,” insists Macranger at the conservative blog Macsmind “The entire act should be repealed as it is an afront to the First Amendment — thus unconstitutional. Still, this is a small victory for sure.”

Who’s the big winner? NBC’s Mark Murray feels it’s Mitt Romney, whose first comment was “Score one for free speech.”

Murray notes that “this isn’t the first time — and it won’t be the last — Romney has tried to whack G.O.P. rival McCain over his authorship of McCain-Feingold. ‘My fear is that McCain-Kennedy would do to immigration what McCain-Feingold has done to campaign finance and money in politics, and that’s bad,’ Romney said at the second G.O.P. debate.”

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway seems to have a tad of sympathy for the Arizona senator:

McCain has long been distrusted by the base but he at least had the support of independents, who thought of him as a “maverick” and a “straight talker.” Unfortunately for him, he is bucking the tide by backing the president on the two least popular issues, the war and illegal immigration. I just don’t see how he turns around the numbers given that. The irony is that many of the people who hate McCain because he’s “not conservative enough” and who are angry at him for McCain-Feingold are enthusiastically rallying behind Fred Thompson, who voted for that bill and is less conservative than McCain on most key issues.

Then again, if Thompson really wants to be president, he’s going to have to, you know, enter the race at some point. Does it seem likely his voting record might come under a bit more scrutiny then?