Justices side with senator in campaign finance case

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority sided Monday with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and struck down a provision of federal campaign finance law, a ruling that a dissenting justice said runs the risk of causing “further disrepute” to American politics.

The court, by a 6-3 vote, said the provision Cruz challenged limiting the repayment of personal loans by candidates to their campaigns violates the Constitution.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority that the provision “burdens core political speech without proper justification.”

The Biden administration had defended it as an anti-corruption measure, but Roberts wrote the government had not been able to show that the provision “furthers a permissible anticorruption goal, rather than the impermissible objective of simply limiting the amount of money in politics.”

Justice Elena Kagan disagreed, writing that for two decades the provision checked “crooked exchanges.” Kagan said in a dissent for herself and the court’s two other liberals that striking down the provision, “greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop.”

In an emailed statement, Cruz’s attorney, Charles Cooper, said the ruling: “is a victory for the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech.”

The case involved a section of the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, commonly referred to as the Mccain-feingold campaign-finance law. The provision said that if candidates lend their campaigns money before an election, the campaigns cannot repay candidates more than $250,000 using money raised after Election Day.