A U.S. district judge last week found the rules of the Federal Election Commission didn’t reflect the intent of Congress when two years ago it passed its landmark campaign finance reform. Worse, according to the judge, the FEC may have created loopholes that make the use of soft money easier. Congress needn’t wait for the FEC to appeal this case; it already knows that lax rules and even more lax enforcement have made reform a joke.

But elections don’t need new laws. They need an overhaul of the watchdog FEC to end the fiction that 527 groups – political-action organizations such as MoveOn and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth – are anything but extensions of political campaigns. Sen. Susan Collins, one of the first Republicans to sign on to campaign-finance reform, observed this week that money in politics will “always find a loophole, but the FEC didn’t step in” to oversee the 527s. “This tells me a lot about the FEC. This was not a failure of the law so much as a failure of implementation, which I find appalling.”

It is appalling. By not having to register as federal political committees, the 527s, named for the tax code under which they are formed, do not have to abide by contribution limits or meet reporting requirements for the money they have raised. They can contribute millions of dollars in advertising, have clear ties to the political parties if not the candidates themselves and yet escape oversight.

No one is suggesting that the content of their advertisements be controlled – what reformers say, correctly, is that they should fall under the same restrictions as other parts of a political campaign. There is legislation in Congress to do that, although it does not look as if it will pass this year.

More to the point, however, is whether the FEC allowed this situation to grow. The FEC says it will do something about these organizations – after the election this fall. But has there been any doubt about the role of 527s in electing specific candidates? (Which presidential candidate do you think MoveOn wants voters to choose? How about Swift Boat Veterans?)

Fortunately, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly saw this clearly and rejected 15 of the 19 rules to implement the campaign-finance law. She was thorough in her lengthy decision, detailing the shortcomings of the rules and, saying, for instance, that one of them creates a loophole to circumvent spending limits, setting up a “potential for gross abuse.” The potential has been realized through the 527s.

The response from Congress should be clear: Insist the FEC regulate these political organizations and overhaul the commission so that it operates in a way that prevents oversights like this one from happening again.