A lawsuit Ted Cruz filed against the FEC now heads to the Supreme Court after they told him he couldn’t pay himself back all the money he lent his campaign in 2018, which exceeded the FEC cap of $250k.
Here’s the details:
THE HILL – The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to review a legal challenge by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to federal limits on reimbursing candidates for personal loans made to their campaign.
The move comes after Cruz in June notched a victory in a lower federal court, prompting the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) appeal to the Supreme Court.
At issue is a provision of federal election law that sets a $250,000 cap on the amount of post-election donation money that a campaign can use to repay a candidate’s personal loan.
The dispute over the federal limit arose after Cruz put $260,000 of his own money into his 2018 reelection campaign and sued the FEC in April 2019 as he attempted to pay off his debt.
In June, a federal three-judge district court panel in Washington, D.C., sided with Cruz, striking down rules limiting how much money candidates can raise after an election to pay off loans.
In a 31-page ruling, the court found the repayment cap, instituted in the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, violated Cruz’s free speech rights.
“Because the government has failed to demonstrate that the loan-repayment limit serves an interest in preventing quid pro quo corruption, or that the limit is sufficiently tailored to serve this purpose, the loan repayment limit runs afoul of the First Amendment,” wrote Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
I would hope that the high court would give Cruz a victory here because there’s no reason why any candidate, who loans their campaign money from their personal account, shouldn’t be able to pay that exact amount back, whether it’s $260k or one million dollars.
We’ve seen a lot more nefarious campaign shenanigans from Democrats like Ilhan Omar, who invent family businesses so that their can get rich off their campaign cash and claim it’s legitimate. That’s a case I’d love to see go to the Supreme Court, but why isn’t it? If there were ever a case for the FEC to prosecute, that would be it.