It really depends on your perspective. From one perspective, it was terrible that the least sympathetic defendants they could come up with were like Thomas Paine's great-grandsons targeted by a tyrannical FEC, so the courts really had no choice but to throw out the terrible law. From another perspective, it was really convenient that all the rhetorical noise and political effort that went into McCain-Feingold could be neutered so easily. Why did Deputy Solicitor General Malcolm Stewart really start out with such an absolutist argument? The "even one sentence" formula was fairly shocking in that context, but the public may never know why he used it...