Ted Cruz (R-Cancun) Blew $10,000 So the Supreme Court Could Make It Easier to Bribe Wealthy Politicians
PLUS: Barry Bonds can use his 762 career home runs to console himself for missing out on the Baseball Hall of Fame.
I’m just shooting from the hip here so you’d have to ask Ted Cruz if I got these numbers right, but according to a quick Google search, a round-trip business class flight for four on United to Cancun is going to cost close to $7000 and a week-long hotel stay there will set you back around $2000 (I don’t know, that seems like a lot for a flight, not enough for the room, I really have no point of reference for this) but then you got to stay fed down there and, like, maybe there’s a nice continental breakfast at the hotel, but if you spend around $35 a day to feed everyone and truth be told I don’t know how expensive Ted Cruz’s tastes are but I’m guessing they don’t run to the budget side so if you do all that math…what I’m saying is it’s probably pretty easy for someone like Ted Cruz to drop $10,000 on a week-long getaway to Cancun. Which may explain why he was in front of the Supreme Court last week trying to tear down the United States’ campaign finance laws to personally recoup that amount.
Actually, in all fairness to Teddy Cancun, he’s been brewing this stew since Beto O’Rourke nearly turned him into a lobbyist for a Wall Street bank in 2018. (By the way, it’s OK to make fun of Ted Cruz. He brings it on himself. No matter his utility to the conservative movement, the fact that he’s loathed by everyone in politics is common knowledge. Just remember what Al Franken said about him once, which, as it turns out, is one of the more generous things that has ever been uttered about the senator:
“I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”
Anyway, back in 2018, on the day before Election Day, Cruz loaned his campaign $260,000 despite the fact that he had $2.38 million on hand and had already raised over $35 million over the previous two years. Now you might be saying Cruz could have had a very good election-related reason to loan that amount of money to his campaign but you would be wrong. The whole point of that loan was really just to troll the Federal Election Commission and the United States’ campaign finance regulations.
As it turns out, there is a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (more commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act) that states campaigns for federal office cannot repay more than $250,000 worth of loans made by the candidate to his or her campaign using money raised after the election. Campaigns also have twenty days after the election to get all this straightened out before any amount of the loan over the $250,000 is reclassified as a contribution. As it so happened, Cruz just kind of let that last detail slip—maybe he was too busy celebrating his victory at the Cancun Ritz-Carlton, I don’t know—but at some point after the twenty days had elapsed, Cruz—presumably poolside, sipping a mojito—emailed his campaign to say (and I quote, this is for reals), “Since more than 20 days have passed, it would be REALLY good if we could pay back at least some of the $250k now.” Having just spent seven months haggling with my credit card company over a $93.79 charge, yeah, I’d want that money back too! So his campaign (which I can only assume hated their principle so much that they were trying to screw him out of a couple hundred grand) went to cut a check to their boss but SURPRISE! those twenty days had passed, meaning Cruz was now out $10,000 (insert mojito spit-take here) and let’s face it: The bottle pack beach party at Coco Bongo is not cheap and if you’re really in the mood for a wild night out on the streets of Cancun, that “250k” may not cover it.
Now most senators would have been like, “Man, I sure screwed up but let’s not make a big deal out of this” because complaining about not getting back the last $10,000 of a $260,000 loan you made to your own campaign to get yourself elected to the Senate might rub some voters the wrong way. But not Teddy Cancun; he’s learned a lot of voters will still pull the lever for you no matter how repulsive you are, how many times you abandon them in the middle of an ice storm, or how many insurrections you foment. “This isn’t about the money, although it is kind of about the money,” he proclaimed to his fellow snorkelers trapped with him on the tour boat, “it’s about principle, specifically the First Amendment, and my right to control when and how much I want to speak during an election, because money is speech and I have $10,000 worth of speech my campaign owes me right now, so I’m taking this all the way to my conservative buddies on the Supreme Court,” at which point all his fellow travelers leapt off the boat and began swimming back to shore.
Now, of course, this was not a mere oversight on Ted Cruz’s part. He intentionally loaned his campaign $260,000 and intentionally waited twenty days to ask for it back to create this very scenario. That’s right: Cruz sacrificed $10,000 of his own personal wealth to strike down a law that will enable candidates who are able to toss hundreds of thousands (if not millions or tens of millions) of their own dollars into their own campaigns to recover such expenditures. After all, this country isn’t free so long as rich people aren’t really free.
Now just never mind that if Teddy Cancun had asked for no more than $10,000 back prior to that twenty-day grace period, his campaign could have reimbursed him that amount and then repaid him the $250,000 at their leisure and even with campaign funds raised after the election. But I get it, this is a test case, meaning it’s essentially a set-up, nothing wrong with that, and test cases come before the Supreme Court all the time. As Justice Clarence Thomas reminded us last week when this case was argued before the Court, what Ted Cruz is doing is no different than what Homer Plessy did in 1892 when he created a test case by sitting in a “whites only” train car in New Orleans. Of course, one big difference is the Court isn’t going to screw Cruz over the way they did Plessy, but I see where you’re going with that thought experiment, Clarence.1
To clarify, here’s what this case is about: Federal law basically prevents candidates from recouping more than $250,000 in personal campaign loans with money they raise after Election Day. Cruz wants that provision—both the dollar amount and the restriction on paying it back with post-election funds—gone. The case was argued before the Supreme Court last week, and it’s pretty clear Cruz is going to win.
Why is that law in place? A couple reasons. First, it is legal for a candidate to charge their own campaign interest on that loan. Nearly every article I’ve read about this lawsuit mentions the case of Democratic congresswoman Grace Napolitano, who loaned her campaign $150,000 in 1998 at 18% (later reduced to 10%) interest. About ten years later, she had raised nearly $220,000 to repay that loan, of which $158,000 had been classified as interest. It’s not like Napolitano got rich running for public office but she still found a way to earn a little coin while doing so. Now imagine how much money someone could make if that $250,000 limit was lifted. Of course, no prominent politician these days could ever get away with turning a campaign for public office into a money-making endeav—…oh wait. (For further reference, see here and here and here.)
Secondly, the law was an attempt to prevent bribery, or at least a situation that comes pretty close to something like bribery. Imagine if a candidate loaned their campaign $1 million at the start of their campaign to get it up-and-running with the expectation that over the course of the campaign they would hold fundraisers and generate enough money for the campaign to pay them back. That doesn’t seem too egregious because it’s all money-in and money-out within the timeframe of a campaign cycle. That $1 million debt takes on a different character post-election, however. By that point, the fundraising appeal isn’t directed toward achieving an unknown electoral outcome anymore, but at restoring a candidate’s wealth. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would love to fill the bank account of a victorious yet debt-ridden senator (who may also be charging interest on that loan.)
Someone like Amy Coney Barrett may not find that scenario all that problematic because, as she said during oral arguments the other day, all those incoming donations are only being used to repay a loan rather than lining Teddy Cancun’s pockets. Which, yes, the politician who loans his campaign $1 million isn’t profiting off the payback but they’d probably be really happy if someone did reimburse them some folding money (although someone who can loan their campaign a million bucks probably[?] isn’t missing it much, either, but more on that in a bit.) And it is true as Brett Kavanaugh pointed out that any candidate-funded loan can only be paid back in $2900 increments, as that’s how much an individual can donate to a candidate per election cycle. At that rate, Teddy Cancun would need to find 90 different individuals to fork over that amount of cash to repay his $260,000 loan (360 individuals for a $1 million loan sans interest) which would suggest it would be hard for any one of those 90 different individuals to personally impress upon Cruz the need to do their bidding (unless, of course, by “90 different individuals” we actually mean “90 different oilmen” or “90 different Mar-a-Lago club members.”) And yes, any donor who gives the maximum $2900 to Cruz to pay off his debt can’t contribute anything more to his election campaign during that election cycle, which has the potential to handicap Cruz in that race, but then again Cruz did raise $35 million for the general so why not use a medium-interest loan to cushion his bank account (Senate salaries are only $174,000 after all and the job is soooo stressful, but let me tell you, the 10-step hydrotherapy program at Fiesta Americana will just take that all away) and come on, would you rather write out a check to Teddy Cancun so he can throw up a billboard in Abilene or so he can finally go on that Isla Mujeres catamaran tour he’s been yearning to do for so long?
On a more serious note: While people tend to get worked up over matters related to campaign finance (you’ve probably seen those social media posts asserting politicians should wear jackets like NASCAR drivers so we know who sponsors them) the issue is really a lot more muddled than that. Everybody worries politicians will be corrupted by their donors, but studies have shown campaign donations don’t work that way. There just isn’t evidence that donating to a politician causes that candidate to support their donor. The causal relationship actually tends to work in the opposite direction: A candidate’s support for an issue will lead donors who support that position to give that candidate money. Donors want proof their money is going to support a candidate who will support their causes. In other words, those donations are more like a reward than a bribe or a quid pro quo.
It’s also true the most well-funded candidates don’t always win. Joe Biden, for instance, was often outspent in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign by the likes of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, and Pete Buttigieg, and there are all sorts of examples of politicians who were prolific fundraisers but fared no better in elections than comparable candidates who didn’t raise as much money. No matter how much cash someone is willing to spend on an election, it’s hard to overcome electoral factors like party ID and ideology. Politicians just can’t buy elections.
But I do worry about a few things. My biggest concern is with the 501(c)(4) organizations and SuperPACs which, working together, can raise and spend unlimited sums of money from undisclosed donors and effectively run a supposedly “uncoordinated” shadow campaign for a candidate. (This is the “dark money” system you may have heard about. Here’s a primer courtesy of Stephen Colbert.) Another issue—and one that is very hard to address—is the simple fact that it’s much easier for profit-driven organizations like corporations to use money to influence the political system than it is for public interest non-profits, since a corporation merely has to dip into its profits to pay for a political operation while non-profits have to solicit donations and then use some of what they earn to pay for a staff tasked with getting more donations and turning those donations into political leverage. Consequently, it’s relatively easy for a corporation to donate money to a SuperPAC, fund a lobbying unit, and potentially gain access to and influence a politician or the legislative process.
There’s also the unsettling realization that while money may not be all that influential in shaping political outcomes, politicians sure do spend a lot of time chasing it and people with money sure like spending it on political activities. Maybe politicians feel more secure staring down primary and general election opponents with a bunch of cash on hand. Maybe it’s all just some quixotic pursuit of something that appears to signify rather than actually represents political power. I don’t know. But history certainly demonstrates money can corrupt politics, and in a political system like ours that is flush with money, it seems pretty reasonable to take steps to keep money from distorting our politics.
Consequently, it’s disturbing to see the direction the Supreme Court is taking the country on matters of campaign finance. They seem to believe that most restrictions on campaign finance are limitations on political speech, which, yes, candidates running for public office rely on money to communicate with voters and may be prevented from doing so if campaign finance regulations are too tight, but the Court doesn’t seem all that responsive to the concern that those with more money will have an easier time getting their speech heard and that regulations that try to limit big money’s influence in politics may be beneficial. If anything they seem overly worried that recent attempts to regulate campaign finance would prevent big money from putting their thumb on that scale.
Which brings me to my critical point, which is, did anybody notice Ted Cruz loaned his campaign $260,000? Not $260, not $2,600, not $26,000. $260,000. That’s a lot of money! I mean, not a lot of money if you’re talking national GDP or corporate earnings or professional sports salaries, but in terms of your average yearly household income, yeah, that’s a sizeable chunk of legal tender, way more than most Americans have on hand if they needed some cash to start a business or buy a home or send a kid to college. I got pretty wound up when my credit card company wouldn’t refund me that $93.79. If I lost out on $10,000 like Cruz did, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed for days. I can’t even fathom loaning myself $260,000.
I’m also guessing if you’re loaning yourself $260,000 you’re probably leaving a comfortable chunk of personal wealth behind rather than emptying the savings account. Maybe he always counted on getting all but the last $10,000 back in twenty days time, but how casual can you be about shifting “$250k” between bank accounts? (Who even writes numbers like that? What, is it too much to type out all those zeroes? Are they too hard to keep track of?) When the case was argued before the Court, Brett Kavanaugh was totally on Cruz’s wavelength. Explaining why a candidate may need to make a last second loan in excess of $250,000 to their campaign, Kavanaugh said, “You’re emptying the coffers. It’s down to the wire. There are no pre-election funds left.” For Kavanaugh, that’s just what you do if you’re a candidate for public office in a tight race in the United States: You rummage through the sofa cushions for $250,000 worth of loose change. No biggie.
Oh, and remember, Teddy Cancun wants to eliminate the $250,000 payback limit all together. I mean, c’mon, if Mr. Burns were to run for public office, he shouldn’t have to supply his campaign with a few million dollars and actually expect to lose it, should he? How much can we ask of millionaires using their financial power to acquire political power? This is just speculation, but based on the vibes I’m picking up from the Court, if Congress were to pass legislation aimed at knocking down some of these laws states have passed recently that are basically attempts at voter suppression, I wouldn’t doubt it if the conservative majority on the Court would tear that legislation up in the name of “states rights” and “congressional overreach.” Maybe that makes it harder for a working class resident of Houston’s Third Ward to use their vote to speak politically, but at least Ted Cruz (net worth: $3-4 million) could go ziplining through the jungles of the Yucatan without ever having to worry about whether or not he was ever going to see the hundreds of thousands of dollars he loaned his campaign again.
American campaign finance law has long allowed individuals to contribute unlimited amounts of money to their own campaigns. I don’t really get that, as that seems to afford rich candidates an advantage candidates of more modest means don’t have. Why not set a low limit on how much an individual can give to their own campaign even if that limit is still somewhat higher than the current $2900 individual contribution limit? Maybe just double or triple it, or allow for a single large initial contribution, I don’t know. Sure, it’s the individual’s campaign and they’re the one invested in it and the only money they may have to get that campaign rolling early on may be their own and they can’t really bribe themselves, so I understand the argument that candidates ought to be able to spend however much they want on their own political undertaking, whether that’s nothing at all or the $20 million fleece aficionado Glenn Youngkin just dropped on his Virginia gubernatorial campaign.
But man, what sort of political system have we designed for ourselves if the big question before the Supreme Court is if a $250,000 limit on a personal loan to one’s own campaign is unfair to those who want to loan themselves way more than that? That’s just an invitation for bored egotistical millionaires to run for public office. Again, money isn’t determinative in elections—issues, talent, message, and organization matter—but even if you’re someone with a modest degree of wealth, you’d have to think twice before jumping into a race against a multimillionaire with full campaign coffers who holds fundraisers to pay off the loans they’ve made to their own campaign while you’d be begging for money just to keep your campaign afloat. And yes, politicians past and present tend to be fairly wealthy, but the fact that someone has acquired substantial personal wealth and can just hop a flight to tropical Cancun when an ice storm knocks the power out does not uniquely qualify that individual to lead the republic. Unfortunately, Ted Cruz and the Federalist Society’s Supreme Court Branch beg to differ.
Follow-Up to Last Week’s Article
Last week, in my review of Joe Biden’s first year in office, I wrote this about West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, who has almost single-handedly blockaded Biden’s domestic agenda:
My new theory about Manchin is that the ideological content of the bill ultimately doesn’t matter all that much to him….What matters more to Manchin is that he wants to be the architect of the bill. In his heart, Manchin fancies himself a-wheeler-and-a-dealer. Unlike Bernie Sanders, whose service in the Senate is motivated by ideology, Manchin is there because that’s where the action is, and he wants to play the role of lead negotiator. If he isn’t playing that role, he’s not happy. Without his input and guidance, any bill—even one designed with him in mind—is by definition a bad bill. He’s not a rubber stamp, he does not merely want to be consulted, he does not want to tinker at the margins of legislation, he does not want to be told to get in line, he does not want someone else dictating the terms to him. He wants to go into a smoke-filled room and negotiate with someone else what gets included in his bill. Manchin’s not someone to be bargained with; he is the bargainer-in-chief. Not only does it fit his brand back home—at the end of the day, he can tell his constituents he never let Washington roll him because he personally vetted every aspect of the bill—but it also stokes his ego.
Well, a day after I published that article, Manchin told reporters any new negotiations on Build Back Better would have to “start with a clean sheet of paper” and that “we'll just be starting from scratch whenever we start.” Sounds like Manchin wants to write the bill.
Garbage Time: Barry Bonds Has MLB’s Home Run Records. He Doesn’t Need a Hall of Fame Plaque.
(Garbage Time theme song here)
Red Sox slugger David Ortiz was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this week in his first year of eligibility. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa were not in their last year of eligibility. The only way they’re making it in now is if the Veteran’s Committee gives them the call.
Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa of course were three of the biggest names associated with Major League Baseball’s steroid scandal. Other prominent names connected to that scandal have either been passed over (Mark McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro) or are getting no love from HOF voters (Alex Rodriguez [who received 34.3% in his first time on the ballot this year], Manny Ramirez [who couldn’t crack 30% in his sixth year on the ballot]).
As for Ortiz, his record with steroids is not quite clean. In 2003, his name appeared on a list compiled by federal investigators of over 100 players who had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during spring training. Legitimate questions were raised about the reliability of the test results, however, and Ortiz, while admitting to using legal supplements, denied using steroids. Additionally, once a testing regimen was put in place in 2004, Ortiz never once returned a positive test. Unlike Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire, Palmeiro, Rodriguez, and Ramirez, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He can’t help but be tainted by the era, though.
The legacy of steroids has made a muddle of the Hall of Fame voting process. Steroid use was widespread in the Major Leagues for some time, contributing to inflated power numbers and other gaudy stats. In that era, big league rosters were full of superhuman players performing superhuman feats. Looking back now, however, we have to wonder how much of that was the product of performance-enhancing drugs, if players we never suspected of doping actually were, and if good-but-not-great players ended up having Hall of Fame careers as a result. It makes trying to figure out who belongs in the HOF a mess.
For example, Bonds was already a lock for the Hall of Fame by the time he started juicing after watching McGwire and Sosa chase Roger Maris’ single-season home run record in 1998. Before the decade was out, he was widely recognized as the best player of the 1990s. It would only have been a matter of time before he hit the usual milestones (500 HRs, 3,000 hits) associated with a first-ballot HOF career. The same can be said of Clemens. If you threw out all of their accomplishments post-steroids, they’d still probably be the best hitter and pitcher of their generation.
Furthermore, Bonds and Clemens were facing off against many other players who were also probably using steroids. That was the way the game was played back then, and they were the best players of that iteration of the game.
Bonds, Clemens, and Co. were also the ones who got caught (in some cases, retrospectively). Here’s a list of Hall of Famers who left their biggest marks on the game in the so-called Steroid Era:
Roberto Alomar, Barry Larkin, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, Frank Thomas, Craig Biggio, Randy Johnson, Pedro Martinez, John Smoltz, Ken Griffey Jr., Mike Piazza, Jeff Bagwell, Ivan Rodriguez, Vladimir Guerrero, Trevor Hoffman, Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, Mariano Rivera, Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, Derek Jeter, Larry Walker, David Ortiz
How confident are you that none of those players used steroids? I’m not confident at all. But how do you prove a negative?
Also, why keep Bonds and everyone else out when the man who presided over the era by covering his ears and singing “La la la la la la” for years every time someone mentioned steroids is in the Hall of Fame?
Yeah, “vast change to the game.” That’s funny.
And what do you do about someone like Fred McGriff, a player with a beanpole physique (suggesting he never used steroids) who amassed 493 career home runs and a career .284 average but who is not in the Hall of Fame because his numbers pale in comparison to his steroid-enhanced peers. In some alternative universe where steroids never made their way into MLB, the Crime Dog (that nickname alone merits induction) might be recognized as one of his era’s iconic players (although he already kind of is.)
And there is, of course, the reality that no matter how many steroids you and I may take, we wouldn’t stand a chance in the batter’s box against major league pitching. As they say, hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in all of sports. Steroids ain’t gonna help you do that. (There’s even some doubt about how much extra strength steroids provide; maybe just enough to get McGwire’s 62nd home run of the 1998 season over the fence, I don’t know. If anything, though, they probably help a player recover more quickly and potentially extend a player’s productivity late into their career.)
Jeff Passan, a baseball reporter for ESPN, wrote this week that it’s wrong to keep Bonds out of the Hall of Fame:
The simple truth is that Barry Bonds is the story of the steroid era. He is a player whose physical gifts knew no limits -- and whose desire for something beyond greatness took him to a place he never needed to go. His greed mirrored the league’s: the ceaseless pursuit of bigger, better, more. This is the history that demands to be told, and there is no better place to tell it than in the plaque room at the Hall of Fame.
We should be able to acknowledge that Bonds is a cheater, bemoan his actions and argue persuasively that he belongs in Cooperstown anyway. Even those who take the Hall of Fame seriously enough that they believe by excluding Bonds they’re protecting it are obligated to acknowledge that history, the museum's mission, can be complicated and disappointing and sad.
I actually think Passan gets that argument backwards. Of course you tell Bonds’ story at the Baseball Hall of Fame along with those of McGwire, Sosa, Clemens, and all the others. Those stories belong in the museum. They just don’t belong in the plaque room. As much as those stories ought to be told (by the way, try telling a kid the glorious story of the 1998 home run race or Bond’s quest for athletic immortality and see how that goes) Bonds and Co. don’t deserve a plaque no matter how hard it is to sort out the clean from the performance-enhanced.
See, when it comes down to it, Bonds already has what he wants: 762 career home runs (seven more than Hank Aaron’s 755) and 73 single-season home runs (three more than Mark McGwire’s 70, ten more than Sammy Sosa’s 63, and 12 more than Roger Maris’s 61). Those records are his and his alone. He’s the all-time home run king. Not Babe Ruth, not Roger Maris, not Hank Aaron. Barry Bonds. No one can take that away from him without also swinging a mighty bat themselves. Take it from me, as a kid growing up playing baseball, those numbers—61 and 755—they had totemic power. And Bonds destroyed them, replaced them with 73 and 762, made them his own. That’s Bonds’ prize. He can put it in his trophy case, look at it every night before he goes to bed and sleep easy knowing he took the two most hallowed records in all of American sports and hollowed them out. There isn’t a plaque big enough to commemorate that feat.
Exit music: “Slow Turning” by John Hiatt (1988, Slow Turning)
By the way, if you were a Supreme Court justice and you got to work one morning and you were informed Ted Cruz had a case he wanted you to hear, wouldn’t you be like, “Wait, is this a scam? Why isn’t this in my spam folder? This isn’t going to lead to an insurrection, is it? If I read this, there’s no chance I inadvertently see some porn, is there?” (The Supreme Court knows it when it sees it, after all!) I mean, you don’t even have to be a Supreme Court justice to have this reaction. If you were in a buffet line and someone said, “Hear me out, you should really try the pot roast,” and you turned around and it was Ted Cruz who told you that, wouldn’t the pot roast be the absolute last thing you’d put on your plate? Wouldn’t you be wondering why in the world you were even at that buffet to begin with?