Texas State Senator Ted Cruz is campaigning with Senator Penilbania’s hopeful Dave McCormick.
Aimee Dilger | Light Rocket | Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of Senator Ted Cruz, who challenged the Election Funding Act, which restricts the use of post-election funds to repay candidates who lend large amounts of money to their campaigns. bottom.
In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that the regulation in question “burdens the core political speech without proper justification.” The majority were also dissatisfied with the Biden administration’s claim that regulation would help avoid the emergence of political corruption in the government.
The decision divided the conservative majority courts along the lines of ideology, which liberal judges disputed.
“The theory of legislation is easy to understand. Political contributions in the pockets of candidates who ran after the election pose a special risk of corruption,” said Judge Elena Kagan.
Without the rules, “politicians are happy. Donors are happy. The only loser is the people. It inevitably suffers from government corruption,” added Judges Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. Kagan wrote.
Regulations from the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act section prohibited campaigns from spending more than $ 250,000 in post-election funds to repay candidate loans to fund those campaigns. .. Any excess can only be repaid with pre-election funds within 20 days of the election.
Cruz had lent $ 260,000 for his successful 2018 campaign against democratic challenger Beto O’Rourke. Twenty days after the election, Cruz’s personal loan of $ 10,000 remained unpaid.
A senator who deliberately exceeded the $ 250,000 limit to encourage legal opposition to the regulation claimed that the 20-year-old rule violated his right to free speech. A federal district court upheld Cruz and ruled that the law discouraged “personal funding for campaign speeches.”
The Supreme Court upheld the ruling. Judge John Roberts wrote to the majority that the law increases the risk that some candidates may not be able to get their loans back after the election. “This time, some candidates may be discouraged from lending money to the campaign in other ways, reducing the volume of political speeches,” Roberts wrote.
“By banning candidates from using this important source of election funding, [the regulation] Higher barriers to entry will ruin political speeches. “
He also wrote that there is “pretty poor” evidence that can be used to support the argument that regulation is needed to prevent possible political corruption.
In her dissenting opinion, Cagan wrote that the majority of decisions to withdraw regulations were “difficult to understand.”
The limitation of repayment of large campaign loans with post-election donations is that the donations in question “personally enrich already elected people”, so “both corruption and the emergence of corruption of the Quid Proquare type”. The purpose is to target.
“By allowing these payments to go unlimited, today’s decision only makes the country’s political system even more unpopular,” Kagan wrote.
