REACTION TO THIS month’s decision upholding the key provisions of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law was swift and predictable: The Supreme Court has outlawed free speech!

If that’s true, it’s nothing new.

From the time the original campaign finance law was passed a century ago until 1988, we didn’t have soft money, or at least not enough to notice. But in the 1988 presidential election, the parties started using these unlimited contributions to sidestep the laws that limit donations to candidates.

We suffered for even longer — from the very start of our republic until they were invented in 1998 — without the so-called “issue ads,” those TV spots that are designed to get you to vote against a given candidate, but pretend to be about that candidate’s position on a given issue so they aren’t covered by campaign finance laws.

No, McCain-Feingold merely restores the status quo, by removing these recently invented dodges.

And it doesn’t even entirely do that. For nine months in election years, and year-round in other years, the NRA and ACLU and any other special interest group or individual can run all the ads they want trying to convince voters that this or that law or proposal is a good idea or a bad idea. Even during those three months, they’re free to run all the ads they want, as long as they follow the same fund-raising rules as candidates or don’t mention the name of a federal candidate in his or her district. They’re free to make their case and tie it directly to candidates during those three months if they do so by mail or phone or in the newspaper or anywhere besides the publicly owned airwaves.

If free speech is dead, someone forgot to tell Howard Dean, the longshot nobody who catapulted to front-runner in the Democratic presidential contest under the new campaign finance law. Some believe the new law, which favors candidates who rely on smaller donors, is a big reason for that turnabout; true or not, it certainly did nothing to hinder his getting his message out.

If you buy this argument that money equals speech (and you must in order to believe that free speech is dead, or even injured), then you must also believe that rich people deserve to have their voices heard more than poor people, that lawmakers should listen to the rich more than they listen to the middle-class. You must believe that freedom of speech means the freedom to drown out all other voices.

The Supreme Court didn’t overturn its disturbing money-equals-speech doctrine last week. But it acknowledged that another important value — the integrity of our system of government — was being undermined by the campaign money free-for-all.

People aren’t stupid. They know that when someone spends tens of thousands of dollars to put a candidate into office, that candidate is likely to care more about what his benefactor thinks than about what the rest of us think. That makes people think their ideas don’t matter, so they don’t bother to vote, and they don’t trust or respect what their government does. A free society cannot long sustain itself when that happens.

Our Congress recognized that fact, and passed a law to put some reasonable limits on how much money any one individual or group can spend to put a candidate into office. That limits how much any one elected official might feel obliged to do the bidding of that donor, at the expense of her constituents. Critics believe this limits the free speech rights of those who would buy influence with our elected officials. Far from it. What it does is protect the free speech rights of the voters.