The Briefing Room
General Category => National/Breaking News => SCOTUS News => Topic started by: libertybele on October 01, 2021, 09:16:42 pm
-
I anticipate that Ted will lose this one --- SCOTUS is not on the side of the GOP.
Supreme Court to Hear Ted Cruz’s Campaign Finance Challenge
The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear a challenge to a federal campaign finance law brought by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, and a dispute over whether Boston must allow a private group to raise a flag bearing a cross in front of its City Hall.
The campaign finance law case concerns a federal law that places a $250,000 limit on the repayment of personal loans to campaigns using money from postelection donations. Seeking to test the constitutionality of the law, Mr. Cruz lent $260,000 to his 2018 re-election campaign.
The law does allow repayments of loans of more than $250,000 so long as campaigns use pre-election donations and make the repayments within 20 days of the election. But the campaign did not repay Mr. Cruz by that deadline, so he stands to lose $10,000.
Mr. Cruz sued the Federal Election Commission before a special three-judge district court in Washington, arguing that the repayment cap violated the First Amendment.
Judge Neomi Rao, who ordinarily sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, wrote for a unanimous panel that the cap amounted to an unconstitutional burden on candidates’ free speech rights.
“Protections for political speech extend to campaign financing because effective speech requires spending money,” Judge Rao wrote, adding that “the loan-repayment limit intrudes on fundamental rights of speech and association without serving a substantial government interest.”
In the Biden administration’s Supreme Court brief, Elizabeth B. Prelogar, then the acting solicitor general, noted that Mr. Cruz’s campaign had more than $2 million on hand after the election and could have lawfully repaid him from those funds so long as it did so within 20 days. His injury, she wrote, was self-inflicted.
In any event, Ms. Prelogar wrote, the repayment cap was lawful.
“The loan-repayment limit imposes at most a modest burden on First Amendment rights,” she wrote. “It does not limit the amount of money that a candidate may spend, the amount of money that a campaign may borrow, the amount of money that a candidate may raise or the amount of money that a donor may contribute to a campaign.”.................
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/politics/supreme-court-ted-cruz.html