By David Nather, CQ Staff

When he promised last week that as president he’d nominate only strict constructionists to the Supreme Court, there was one subject John McCain didn’t mention in his review of the court’s trends: the campaign finance overhaul he pushed through Congress six years ago.

That’s probably just as well, because if the Arizona senator has the opportunity to pick people like Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — he mentioned both in a speech at Wake Forest University as models for his own nominees — he probably could say goodbye to the law he wrote with Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin.

MORE LIKE THESE: McCain promised to nominate judges like Alito, left, and Roberts. (BLOOMBERG NEWS / DENNIS BRACK)

As Richard L. Hasen, a professor and election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, sees it, if the court’s left-leaning and oldest justice, John Paul Stevens , departs and is replaced by someone in the mold of either of the justices picked by George W. Bush , “that would be probably the final nail in the coffin for large chunks of McCain-Feingold.”

Both Roberts and Alito have been in the majority on two rulings that overturned narrow areas of campaign finance regulation. In 2006, the court struck down individual campaign contribution limits in Vermont. Last year, in a case involving ads run by Wisconsin Right to Life, the court exempted the group from the limits the McCain-Feingold law places on corporate and union spending.

The court stopped short of overturning that section of the law in all cases, as some of the most conservative justices, including Antonin Scalia , wanted to do. But in a concurring opinion, Alito included a statement that legal experts have read as an invitation to file broader challenges to the law.

Because the court held that its curbs on corporate and union spending were unconstitutional in the case of Wisconsin Right to Life’s ads, “it is unnecessary to go further” and decide whether it is unconstitutional in all cases, Alito wrote, but if that doesn’t settle the issue, “we will presumably be asked in a future case to reconsider the holding” in 2003 that the limits were generally constitutional.

Roberts and Alito were not on the court at that time, and the McCain-Feingold law was upheld by a bare 5-4 majority.

Conservatives were pleased to hear McCain come out against “judicial activism,” and they insist he did the right thing by promising to nominate strict constructionists even if that means the days would be numbered for the campaign law, which was never popular with conservative activists in the first place.

“This is exactly the right way to approach it,” said anti-tax activist Grover Norquist. “He didn’t say, ‘Here are the decisions I want.’ He said, ‘These are the judges I want.’ ”

James Bopp Jr., an attorney who represented several of the groups that challenged the campaign finance law, praised McCain for saying he’d look for justices who understand there are “clear limits to the scope of federal power.” If that means they would also be more open to challenges against the campaign finance law, Bopp said, “that just comes with the territory.”