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4  FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N v. TED CRUZ FOR SENATE 

Opinion of the Court 

As the Government recognizes, the Committee’s present
inability to repay the final $10,000 of Cruz’s loans consti-
tutes an injury in fact both to Cruz and to his Committee. 
See Reply Brief 8.  Cruz, of course, suffers a $10,000 pock-
etbook  harm.    See  Czyzewski  v.  Jevic  Holding  Corp.,  580 
U. S.  451,  464  (2017).  And  the  bar  on  repayment  injures
the Committee by preventing it from discharging its obliga-
tion to repay its debt, which may inhibit that form of financ-
ing  in  the  future.    The  Government  maintains,  however, 
that these injuries are not traceable to the threatened en-
forcement of Section 304, for two reasons: first, because the 
inability to repay Cruz’s loans was “self-inflicted,” and sec-
ond, because it is the threatened enforcement of an agency 
regulation, not the statute itself, that causes the harm.  We 
address each argument in turn. 

A 
First, the Government argues that appellees lack stand-
ing because their injuries were “self-inflicted.”  Brief for Ap-
pellant 20.  Because appellees knowingly triggered the ap-
plication of the loan-repayment limitation, the Government 
says, any resulting injury is in essence traceable to them, 
not  the  Government.    The  predicate  for  this  argument  is 
appellees’  stipulation  in  the  District  Court  that  “the  sole 
and exclusive motivation behind Senator Cruz’s actions in 
making the 2018 loan[s] and the [C]ommittee’s actions in 
waiting to repay them was to establish the factual basis for 
this challenge.”  App. 325.  At bottom, the Government asks 
us to recognize an exception to traceability for injuries that 
a party purposely incurs. 

We have never recognized a rule of this kind under Arti-
cle III.  To the contrary, we have made clear that an injury
resulting from the application or threatened application of 
an unlawful enactment remains fairly traceable to such ap-
plication, even if the injury could be described in some sense 
as  willingly  incurred.  See  Evers  v.  Dwyer,  358  U. S.  202,