(CN) — Senator Ted Cruz wants the nation’s high court to find that limiting how much of a personal loan to his own campaign may be repaid from money raised after an election would violate the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear the Federal Election Commission’s appeal of a court order that found unconstitutional a rule that caps at $250,000 the amount of post-election donations a campaign can use to repay the candidate’s personal loan. Cruz claims the rule prevented him from repaying $10,000 of the $260,000 he loaned his 2018 reelection campaign.
Cruz, a Texas Republican, barely held onto his Senate seat in the 2018 election, defeating Democrat Beto O’Rourke by less than 300,000 votes in a campaign in which the candidates raised a combined $114.8 million. That amount shattered the previous record for a U.S. Senate race, which was set in 2012 by Elizabeth Warren and Scott Brown’s $77 million race for a Massachusetts seat.
Immediately after the 2018 election, Cruz’s campaign had $2.38 million in its coffers but owed its creditors $2.7 million, including the $260,000 owed to Cruz for his personal loan, according to court filings.
The campaign paid off its other creditors first. And 20 days after the election it repaid Cruz just $250,000 in compliance with repayment limits set out in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002.
Cruz sued the Federal Election Commission over the rule in April 2019.
The FEC argued in an October 2020 hearing the repayment cap is needed to guard against the risk or appearance of corruption when elected politicians seek post-election contributions from donors.
But a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia sided with Cruz, ruling the cap unfairly restricts candidates’ free speech in violation of the First Amendment.
“A candidate’s loan to his campaign is an expenditure that may be used for expressive acts. Such expressive acts are burdened when a candidate is inhibited from making a personal loan, or incurring one, out of concern that she will be left holding the bag on any unpaid campaign debt,” U.S. District Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote on behalf of the panel.
The limit applies to third-party loans secured by the candidate and loans from the candidate’s personal funds.
In its petition for review to the Supreme Court, the FEC claims Cruz’s campaign committee lacks standing to bring the challenge because, despite the committee’s claims, there is no evidence it used post-election donations to repay $250,000 of Cruz’s loan.
The FEC claims the committee instead designated all donations received after the November 2018 election to Cruz’s 2024 reelection campaign.
“It is not sufficient to show that post-election funds were available to pay off the first $250,000. Rather, appellees [Cruz’s campaign committee] must establish that they actually used $250,000 in post-election funds for that purpose,” wrote the Department of Justice’s acting solicitor general, Brian Fletcher, in an Aug. 25 brief to the Supreme Court. (Emphasis in original.)
Cruz’s appeal is one of four writs of certiorari the Supreme Court granted Thursday. Other cases concern Nazi art theft during the Holocaust, a Christian flag that flew at Boston City Hall and the 30-day time limit for seeking review in Tax Court.
Cruz, a Harvard Law School graduate, constitutional lawyer and Texas’ former solicitor general, first won election to the Senate in 2012 behind the popularity of the Tea Party, a movement within the Republican Party that advocated for lower taxes and less regulation of states by the federal government.
He has unsuccessfully pushed for repeal of President Barack Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act, throughout his tenure in the Senate.
Cruz lost to Donald Trump in the 2017 Republican presidential primary in a bitter campaign: Trump claimed Cruz’s father, a Cuban immigrant, was involved in the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and Cruz called Trump a “sniveling coward,” a “pathological liar” and “utterly amoral.”
Despite the acidic primary campaign, Cruz went on to become one of Trump’s staunchest allies. He was widely condemned in January for refusing to certify all the Electoral College votes confirming Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election over Trump.
His reputation took another hit in February when news broke that he had traveled to Cancun to vacation with his daughters as Texans suffered through Winter Storm Uri, which caused prolonged power outages across the state and led to the deaths of dozens of Texans from hypothermia.
This loan repayment case before the Supreme Court is not the Texan senator’s only run-in with campaign finance laws.
The Campaign Legal Center filed two complaints against him with the Federal Election Commission in April, accusing him of illegally accepting royalties on the sale of his book after he spent campaign donations to promote it.
Follow Cameron Langford on Twitter.
Follow @cam_langford
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