I saw the above headline from an article in today’s Houston Chronicle by Matt Zdan (that was reprinted from the Lubbock Avalanche Journal). Ted Cruz is suing the Federal Election Commission to try to recover $10,000 that is part of a $260,000 loan that Cruz made to his re-election campaign in 2018, and is trying to be repaid for that final $10,000 piece of the loan from campaign contributions made after his re-election. But what is surreal is what Cruz’s lawyers said in a June 29 memo to the court comparing Ted Cruz to Rosa Parks. Here is that amazing statement by Cruz’s attorneys disagreeing with the FEC refusal to allow that $10,000 repayment that they made to the Court (with details following):
“The FEC also asserts that Senator Cruz and the Cruz Committee inflicted their injuries on themselves because they could have arranged to repay the Senator’s loans using preelection funds. Yes, and Rosa Parks could have sat at the back of the bus.” [Emphasis mine.]
Holy Sh*t! Now what’s going on is that Cruz personally loaned his 2018 re-election campaign $260,000. He could have had that loan repaid to himself in its entirety with campaign contributions before the election. But Cruz choose to repay himself only $250,000 of that personal loan in pre-election campaign funds. But then after he was re-elected he tried to repay himself the last $10,000 of his campaign loan with contributions made after the election. However the FEC declined that $10,000 loan repayment because federal election law specifies that after an election the maximum amount that a campaign can reimburse a personal campaign loan from the candidate is $250,000. So according to the FEC, Cruz could have been repaid the entire $260,000 loan before the election, but not after. In other words, Cruz basically screwed himself out of $10,000.
So now Cruz and his lawyers are trying to claim that this violates his First Amendment rights to free political speech and should be struck down on constitutional grounds (hoping to reach a favorable Supreme Court review). And then came that crazy and impolitic comparison to Rosa Parks!!!
Cruz has been receiving a good deal of blowback on social media for this comment by his lawyers. I searched on diary tags to see if this had been brought up here before but didn’t find any, so I thought this bit of insanity should be mentioned here. This is just crazy...but then it’s Ted Cruz (one of my Senators unfortunately).