Monday was the 30th anniversary of Watergate. That “third-rate burglary” thwarted in the wee hours of June 17, 1972, uncovered, among other repulsive things, the obscene influence of money on politics and led, in the way that good can come from bad, to a strong campaign-finance reform law four years later.

Those post-Watergate reforms worked well for 15 years, until the Federal Election Commission rewrote the rules in the early ’90s to allow the wretched excess of unregulated soft money. As an example of how much faster things move these days, the FEC may wait barely four months before gutting the McCain-Feingold reform law passed in February. Unless the commissioners and the party operatives to whom they owe their jobs are overcome by sudden outbreaks of conscience, a law intended to ban soft money could be shredded before it even takes effect the day after the November election.

The law, passed after five years of bitter partisan deadlock, is supposed to stop the flow of unrestricted donations from corporations, labor unions and wealthy individuals – some $500 million in 2000, double the amount of four years earlier – to the national political parties. It also eliminates those poisonous issue ads, thinly veiled attacks on candidates paid for with soft money.

The rules the commission may vote on next week would merely replace the loopholes McCain-Feingold plugs with new and more cynical ones. Big donors won’t be able to buy the “access” to public officials they prize so highly by direct gifts to the national parties; they’ll have to route it through state parties, which then can route it wherever the need to sell access is greatest. Candidates won’t be able to solicit soft money themselves, but they can engage agents to do it for them.

Perhaps most offensive is the commission’s proposal to allow state parties to run issue ads right up to and through Election Day as long as the ads do not “expressly advocate” or “unmistakably and unambiguously encourage” the defeat or election of a particular candidate. That is the very definition of thinly veiled attacks.

The FEC consists of three Republicans and three Democrats appointed by, and answerable to, party leaders. Most of them were openly hostile to McCain-Feingold when it was being debated; the rules they propose now are openly hostile to its intent and spirit.

And, apparently, also hostile to plain English. McCain-Feingold is remarkably straightforward, yet the commission seems to be buying the arguments by lawyers for both parties that only by stripping the law of all meaning can state party officials be protected from breaking it. The only difference between the two parties – both of which now want credit for passing McCain-Feingold – is that Republicans, by virtue of opposing the law for so long and by raising a court challenge to its constitutionality, are only slightly less hypocritical than the Democrats, who blasted the GOP for opposing the law but who join in robbing it of all meaning. This is a burglary that doesn’t even rise to the level of third rate.