In yet another blow to the Biden administration, the Supreme Court has ruled that a Federal Election Commission (FEC) campaign finance policy favored by Democrats violates the law.
The 6-3 Supreme Court vote was a win for Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who challenged the practice of “regulating the repayment of loans by a candidate to his own campaign,” according to The Epoch Times.
The ruling marks at least the eighth time in as many months that the highest Courts in the land have ruled that Biden’s policies, “guidelines,” or “mandates” are unconstitutional.
The petition was advanced to the Supreme Court after a three-judge panel from the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia unanimously ruled against the FEC policy last year.
The Biden administration argues that disallowing the FEC rule will “open the door to bribery in elections.” However, the Supreme Court found the FEC policy conflicted with First Amendment speech protections.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote the ruling; five Justices joined him to strike down the FEC policy.
Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissenting opinion; Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kagan in the minority opinion.
Justice Roberts’ ruling states:
“The question is whether this restriction violates the First Amendment rights of candidates and their campaigns to engage in political speech. [T]here is no doubt that the law does burden First Amendment electoral speech, and any such law must at least be justified by a permissible interest.”
“When the government restricts speech, the government bears the burden of proving the constitutionality of its actions,” Roberts continued, quoting directly from the 2014 plurality opinion in McCutcheon v. FEC.
Roberts concluded that the government “is unable to identify a single case of quid pro quo corruption … even though most states do not impose a limit on the use of post-election contributions to repay candidate loans. The rule, therefore, “burdens core political speech without proper justification.”
Kagan’s dissent asserted that the Supreme Court was making a mistake.
“In striking down the law today,” Kagan wrote, “the court greenlights all the sordid bargains Congress thought right to stop … In allowing those payments to go forward unrestrained, today’s decision can only bring this country’s political system into further disrepute.”
Kagan agreed with the bribery argument advanced by the Biden administration:
“Repaying a candidate’s loan after he has won election cannot serve the usual purposes of a contribution,” she wrote. “The money comes too late to aid in any of his campaign activities. 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.”
Kagan concluded: “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.”
This is a developing story.
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