WASHINGTON -- Republican Sen. John McCain is not a man to thumb your nose at. He made that clear once again the other day in serving notice to would-be scuttlers of the new campaign finance law he spent seven years helping to steer through Congress.

Barely more than a week after the law went into effect, Mr. McCain fired the opening volley of a new drive to confront artful dodging by the national parties, including his own, and others to evade the "soft money" ban. The ban is the core reform of the law that he, Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Democratic Rep. Marty Meehan of Massachusetts and Republican Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut pushed through earlier this year.

Mr. McCain's first targets are the parties and special interest groups that, with major assistance from members of the Federal Election Commission who are supposed to enforce the law, are creating "shadow committees" to funnel unregulated, unlimited soft money into federal campaigns in violation of the new law.

The McCain-Feingold law ordered an end to soft money contributions to state and local parties starting the day after the Nov. 5 elections.

But party and special interest organizers began even before the cut-off date to set up separate vehicles, blessed by the FEC, into which such money could continue to flow to federal candidates.

Federal officials and candidates are prohibited from soliciting soft money contributions, and the FEC's general counsel recommended that solicitation be interpreted as meaning to "request, suggest or recommend."

But the commission ruled it would be OK for such an official or candidate to dun donors as long as the solicitor didn't explicitly "ask" for money.

Under this silly distinction, the prohibition is meaningless. Years ago in Tulsa, Okla., I accompanied Richard Nixon to a Republican fund-raiser in the home of a wealthy party contributor where Mr. Nixon spoke in behalf of a local GOP candidate. He never "asked" for money other than to alert his listeners that the host had placed blank checkbooks about the living room for their convenience. Variations on that theme are commonplace.

Another main McCain target is the FEC itself, and specifically the three members of his own party on it, plus a lame-duck Democrat who votes often with them to interpret the new law to their own choosing. Some or all of them were hostile to the law before its enactment.

Fred Wertheimer, head of the campaign reform group Democracy 21, argues: "Congress writes the rules and these commissioners don't have the authority to rewrite them according to what they think."

One FEC member, Bradley A. Smith, a law professor and Republican, was openly opposed to campaign finance reform before he was named to the commission and confirmed, after much controversy, in 2000.

A mutual back-scratching arrangement, in which Republican and Democratic congressional leaders recommend appointments to the president, creates a lineup of three Republicans and three Democrats and a stalemate on most controversial matters.

The new regulations that have Mr. McCain and other authors of the new law up in arms have resulted from the conservative lame-duck Democrat, former House committee staffer Karl J. Sandstrom, voting with the three Republicans, although his term expired in April 2001.

At a news conference Thursday, Mr. McCain said "self-serving interpretations of the law proposed by special interests" never would have been adopted "if the FEC had not eagerly served as their agent." The new law "should not be strangled in its crib by four unelected officials," he said.

Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle has sent the name of a Washington ethics and elections lawyer, Ellen Weintraub, to the White House to replace Mr. Sandstrom, and Mr. McCain says he has been assured she will receive a recess appointment before Congress reconvenes in January. But the problem goes beyond any one individual.

The arrangement in which each party picks three FEC members, Mr. Wertheimer says, "is a sweetheart deal" that warrants scrapping the commission and creating a new agency with teeth. But that appears a long way off, even with Mr. McCain again mobilizing his reform forces.

Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.