Posted on 05/16/2022 9:10:54 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The Supreme Court sided with Senator Ted Cruz in a 6-3 decision issued Monday morning in a case brought against him by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over how loans from candidates can be repaid following an election cycle.
The decision was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett while Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissent and was joined in the minority by Justices Breyer and Sotomayor.
Sen. Ted Cruz, who clerked on the Supreme Court, has won his case in FEC v. Ted Cruz for Senate. The court ruled 6-3 that a federal campaign-finance law limiting repayment of loans by candidates violated the First Amendment. https://t.co/KRfI1zNhDR— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) May 16, 2022
As Roberts explains, the situation at issue — while convoluted by the bureaucratic intricacies of U.S. election law — is fairly straight forward:
In order to jumpstart a fledgling campaign or finish strong in a tight race, candidates for federal office often loan money to their campaign committees. A provision of federal law regulates the repayment of such loans. Among other things, it bars campaigns from using more than $250,000 of funds raised after election day to repay a candidate’s personal loans. This limit on the use of post-election funds increases the risk that candidate loans over $250,000 will not be repaid in full, inhibiting candidates from making such loans in the first place. The question is whether this restriction violates the First Amendment rights of candidates and their campaigns to engage in political speech.
The FEC issue arose after Cruz's successful 2018 campaign that was the most expensive U.S. Senate campaign in the nation's history. As the majority opinion explains, Cruz loaned his campaign $260,000 in the final stretch of his race against Vanity Fair cover model Robert Francis O'Rourke. The Cruz campaign began to repay the loan after a 20-day window following the election in which loan repayment of more than than $250,000 is allowed, meaning Cruz didn't receive repayment of the final $10,000 inline with election law. Cruz and his Ted Cruz for Senate Committee then filed action in U.S. District Court, alleging that the law prohibiting loans over a certain amount from being repaid violated the First Amendment.
After hearing the case, the District Court granted summary judgment and held that a loan-repayment limitation is a burden on political speech that lacks adequate justification.
As Chief Justice Roberts writes in the decision affirming the D.C. District Court's judgment, "By restricting the sources of funds that campaigns may use to repay candidate loans, Section 304 increases the risk that such loans will not be repaid. That in turn inhibits candidates from loaning money to their campaigns in the first place, burdening core speech." Roberts further notes that "This Court has recognized only one permissible ground for restricting political speech: the prevention of “quid pro quo” corruption or its appearance." The government's evidence to support its case, Roberts states, "concerns the sort of 'corruption,' loosely conceived, that we have repeatedly explained is not legitimately regulated under the First Amendment."
This was probably more of a Republican Establishment issue than a conservative one.
Ted Cruz IS a natural born citizen of the United States.
Ted Cruz has ALREADY run for President of the United States, so show me any court that ruled he was ineligible fun will you?
ineligible fun will you? = ineligible to run will you?
So have Rubio and Jindal, they are also ineligible.
Go ahead and nominate your favorite ineligible and you will be forfeiting the votes of all of us who know what natural born citizen means.
Natural born citizens are NATURALLY citizens because they CANNOT be anything else.
Anyone who is born also something else is not an natural born citizen, they are the foreigners the founders put the natural born citizen clause in to exclude.
Just SHOW ME ANY COURT ruling that says they and Ted Cruz were ineligible to run for President will ya?
Mere rantings from you just wont do.
You are NOT the law.
And how come you never brought any legal action against there gentlemen yourself, if you really think they were ineligible?
Nah, he just boxed their ears!
There is no rule of law and that should be readily apparent.
Natural born citizen have ONE nationality, that’s why they are NATURALLY citizens...
when do the criminals that perpetrated Russia,Russia,Russia go to trial?
When does the stolen election get rectified?
And that is why we have lost our Republic.
Durham is starting their trial just today. They are facing very serious charges.
Look it up.
I quit trying to reason with Lurch a long time ago. He hates Cruz and it won’t be long until he hates DeSantis.
“So, ya take out a personal loan to run your campaign. After election, you can use postelection contributions from corps or groups to pay off a personal loan. Weird.”
Not exactly. Cruz lent his campaign money from his own pocket, and then used the contributions to repay the loan. As long as the loan was used for legitimate campaign expenses and not to pay some relative or friend for “work” on the campaign, I don’t see any issue with him getting repaid for the loan.
later
Actually, what struck me as “weird” about this is that Senator Cruz lent his campaign exactly $10,000 over the $250,000 that he had to have known beforehand would be his repayment limit after the 20-day reimbursement period was up.
By statue, he could only be fully repaid an amount in excess of the $250,000 within 20 days of the election. He knew that. He loaned $260,000 to his campaign. He waited more than 20 days. His campaign, then, could only reimburse $250,000. Stuck with a loss of $10,000, now he’s a “damaged party” in legal terms, and has cause to sue.
I think Sen. Cruz had this sad sack of an FEC statue in his crosshairs the day he made the loan to his campaign, planned all along to get tripped up by it, to be unable to get that last $10,000 back, and then use that as his basis for this suit. That’s damnably shrewd strategy, if you ask me.
I won't bore you with the ad nauseum arguments made years ago, but when the country started, there was very few people actually born in America, so they wanted to make sure the POTUS would have been. After a few years, it became more common for people to be born here so a child born with one parent a citizen became enough.
Obama was raised in Indonesia as a Muslim, but was deemed "American" by the SCOTUS due to his mother. Personally, I believe he gave up his citizenship to be adopted in Indonesia, and also his name was changed. To be POTUS he had to say whether he ever had an alias. Being named "Barry Soretoro" would qualify.
If you live in Texas, please don't vote, other wise we will end up with Beto as Governor because of your hard headedness. Cruz has an American mother and that has settled it in court several times. However you choose to read it, it has been settled in court and he can run and win.
The Supreme Court has not addressed it.
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