The champion of clean campaigns wants to make it clear that the Internet should fall under the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform law.

Political web bloggers are abuzz, claiming Shays and other campaign finance reformers want to clamp down on free speech.

The liberal dailykos.com and conservative redstate.org are urging visitors to speak out. They say that online activists should not have to worry about accidentally running afoul of campaign finance laws when they are expressing their own opinions on the Internet.

Last week, Congress took up a bill that would have exempted the Internet from campaign finance regulations.

House Republican leaders, confident they had the votes, decided to raise the bill under "a suspension calendar" that bypassed committee review, limited debate to 40 minutes, and prohibited amendments. But it also meant two-thirds of the House had to approve for passage.

When Shays and Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Ma., learned the bill would be called up, they organized a "war room" and lobbied centrists and supporters of their campaign finance law to oppose it.

Shays said he simply wants to prevent individuals, corporations and unions from waging unlimited campaign advertising wars on the Web.

"If this law were to pass, a member of Congress could simply go to a large donor, corporation or union and control their spending of $1 million in soft money to pay for political advertising all over the Internet," he told his colleagues.

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The pair also drafted an alternative bill to protect the right of free speech for people who operate Web logs.

"I understand that many Web bloggers are concerned that somehow campaign finance law will restrict their speech, and I believe allowing bloggers the assurance that they will not be so burdened is something that we can ensure," Shays said.

A majority of the House sided with the bloggers, voting 225 to 182 for the exemption, but it failed to gain the two-thirds needed for passage. As a result, the Federal Elections Commission will likely be left to write the rules and issue opinions on Internet politics.

The commission had initially balked at regulating the Internet, saying the law did not authorize such regulation. Shays and Meehan filed a lawsuit arguing otherwise and a federal judge found in their favor and has ordered the FEC to draft regulations.

Some Web site operators are also hoping to receive exemptions enjoyed by news organizations that are permitted to run candidate endorsements and political commentary outside FEC regulation.

The House debate was interesting on a number of levels.

It's not every day that former House Majority Leader Tom "The Hammer" DeLay, R-Texas, and Rep. Barbara "Department of Peace" Lee, D-Calif., are on the same side.

Rep. Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., a confirmed conservative, said he was proud to cosponsor the bill to "protect the free speech rights of Americans whose only alleged crime is wanting to use the Internet to express their opinions."

Kennedy said that large newspapers and media companies opposed the bill because "they fear the competition bloggers pose to them."

"I disagree with the mainstream media elites at the Washington Post and the New York Times who seem to think that an unregulated media is dangerous," he said.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, chimed in that the Internet is "a great democratizer," giving individuals inexpensive access to a broad audience.

"It costs a huge amount of money to run TV ads. Well, the cost to send an e-mail is almost nothing," she said. "We need to make sure that communications using the Internet are protected & In this case the bloggers have got it right."

Meehan argued that the issue was not free speech but political corruption.

"The primary constitutional basis for campaign finance regulation is preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption of candidates or officeholders. Creating a new way for Members of Congress or the Cabinet to solicit and then coordinate or control unlimited amounts of soft money is precisely the scenario campaign finance reform banned," he said.