Supreme Court agrees with Ted Cruz and strikes one limit on campaign contributions
The Supreme Court split along ideological lines in striking another campaign finance restriction Monday, agreeing with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s challenge to federal limits on the use of post-election contributions to repay a candidate’s loan to his campaign.
It was the latest Supreme Court decision to knock out a part of the landmark 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act — popularly known as the McCainFeingold Act — and reemphasized the court’s view that many restrictions on campaign finance are unconstitutional violations of the First Amendment’s protection of political speech.
Few issues, along with related laws regarding voting rights, divide the court’s conservatives and liberals so cleanly. The 6-to-3 ruling, featuring the dueling opinions of conservative Chief Justice John Roberts and liberal Justice Elena Kagan, provided only the latest example.
“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,” wrote Roberts, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The result was expected after arguments in the case brought by Cruz (Texas), and Roberts said it was simply a logical progression in cases including one of its most controversial, Citizens United v. FEC.
“This Court has recognized only one permissible ground for restricting political speech: the prevention of ‘quid pro quo’ corruption or its appearance,” Roberts wrote, “We have consistently rejected attempts to restrict campaign speech based on other legislative aims.”
For example, “we have denied attempts to reduce the amount of money in politics . . . to level electoral opportunities by equalizing candidate resources . . . and to limit the general influence a contributor may have over an elected official,” he wrote. “However well intentioned such proposals may be, the First Amendment — as this
Court has repeatedly emphasized — prohibits such attempts to tamper with the ‘right of citizens to choose who shall govern them.’” The quote is from one of the previous cases.
Kagan said this one should have been different, because post-election contributions to a winning candidate to pay off a personal loan carry unique corruption risks.
“All the money does is enrich the candidate personally at a time when he can return the favor — by a vote, a contract, an appointment,” she wrote in an dissent joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
“It takes no political genius to see the heightened risk of corruption — the danger of ‘I’ll make you richer and you’ll make me richer’ arrangements between donors and officeholders,” she continued.
The case involved a somewhat obscure portion of the McCain-Feingold Act, named after Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Russ Feingold, D-Wis.
It caps at $250,000 the amount federal candidates can raise and use after an election to repay personal loans. Cruz, in his 2018 Senate reelection campaign against Democrat Beto O’Rourke that Roberts noted was the most expensive in history, lent his campaign $260,000 the day before the general election.
The government tried to have the case thrown out, saying Cruz’s injury was “self-inflicted”; he chose the amount 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.