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Supreme Court agrees with Cruz, strikes campaign contribution restriction

cigaretteman

HR King
May 29, 2001
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The Supreme Court split along ideological lines Monday and agreed with Sen. Ted Cruz’s challenge to a law limiting post-election political contributions to repay a candidate’s loan to his campaign.
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) asked the court to take the case, after a three-judge panel in Washington sided with the Texas Republican and said the law unconstitutionally restricts a candidate’s political expression.

The court’s conservatives agreed in a 6 to 3 ruling.
“The government has not shown that [the law] furthers a permissible anticorruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.






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Justice Elena Kagan dissented, along with Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
“At the very least — even if an illicit exchange does not occur — the public will predictably perceive corruption in post-election payments directly enriching an officeholder,” she wrote, adding that “in striking down the law today, the Court greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop.”
The provision Cruz challenged is part of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act. It limits the amount of money that federal candidates can raise and use after an election to repay personal loans. The government defends the law as necessary to prevent the appearance of quid pro quo corruption.

The limit is $250,000. Cruz, as part of his 2018 Senate reelection campaign against Democrat Beto O’Rourke, lent his campaign $260,000 the day before the general election.






The point was to challenge the law, as only $250,000 of that could be repaid with money raised after the election.
The government tried to have the lawsuit thrown out, saying that Cruz’s injury was “self-inflicted.” Cruz chose the amount in order to exceed the limits for a test case. And his campaign had on hand $2.2 million raised before the election that could have been used to fully repay the loan.
But the appellate judges unanimously disagreed. The flaw in the government’s argument, they said, is that “it would require Senator Cruz to avoid an injury by subjecting himself to the very framework he alleges is unconstitutional.”
On the larger question, the panel said the restriction could not be justified.
The FEC failed to demonstrate “that quid pro quo corruption or its appearance arises from post-election contributions to retire a candidate’s personal debt.”

 
This is why people don't trust Washington. Even with legitimate appearances of quid quo pro, candidates and the court will go out of their way to find excuses for poor handling of entrusted money.
 
This is why people don't trust Washington. Even with legitimate appearances of quid quo pro, candidates and the court will go out of their way to find excuses for poor handling of entrusted money.
If I were doj, I’d just say fine but send a signal that more attention will be paid to criminal bribery/gratuities laws.
 
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