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

Syllabus 

repay a candidate’s personal loans.  But given that these contributions 
are already capped at $2,900 per election in order to prevent corrup-
tion or its appearance, the approach of adding an additional layer of 
regulation is a significant indicator that the regulation may not be nec-
essary for the interest it seeks to protect.  See id, at 221.  Because the 
Government is defending a restriction on speech, it must do more than
“simply posit the existence of the disease sought to be cured”; it must
instead point to “record evidence or legislative findings” demonstrat-
ing the need to address a special problem.  Colorado Republican Fed-
eral Campaign Comm. v. Federal Election Comm’n, 518 U. S. 604, 618. 
“[M]ere conjecture” is “[in]adequate to carry a First Amendment bur-
den.”  McCutcheon, 572 U. S., at 210.  Yet the Government is unable 
to identify a single case of quid pro quo corruption in this context, even 
though most States do not impose a limit on the use of post-election
contributions to repay candidate loans.  Pp. 13–16. 

(ii) In the absence of direct evidence, the Government turns to 
a scholarly article, a poll, and statements by Members of Congress to 
show  that  the  contributions  used  to  repay  candidate  loans  carry  a 
heightened  risk  of  at  least  the  appearance  of  corruption.    All  of  this 
evidence, however, concerns the sort of “corruption,” loosely conceived, 
that this Court has repeatedly explained is not legitimately regulated 
under the First Amendment.  Nor is it equivalent to “legislative find-
ings” that demonstrate the need to address a special problem.  Pp. 16– 
19. 

(iii) As  a  fallback  argument,  the  Government  analogizes  post-
election contributions used to repay a candidate’s loans to gifts because
they enrich the candidate as opposed to the campaign’s treasury.  But 
this  analogy  is  meaningful  only  if  the  baseline  is  that  the  campaign 
will default.  The record suggests, however, that winning candidates 
are commonly repaid in full.  For these candidates, post-election con-
tributions  bear  little  resemblance  to  a  gift;  they  instead  restore  the
candidate to the status quo ante.  As for losing candidates, the Gov-
ernment does not provide any anticorruption rationale to explain why 
contributions  to  those  candidates  should  be  restricted.    Finally,  the 
Government argues for deference to Congress’s “legislative judgment”
that Section 304 furthers an anticorruption goal.  Given scant evidence 
of corruption, deference to Congress would be especially inappropriate 
where,  as  here,  the  legislative  act may have  been  an  effort  to  “insu-
late[ ] legislators from effective electoral challenge.”  Nixon v. Shrink 
Missouri  Government  PAC,  528  U. S.  377,  404  (BREYER,  J.,  concur-
ring).  In the end, it remains the role of this Court to decide whether a 
particular legislative choice is constitutional.  Sable Communications 
of Cal., Inc. v. FCC, 492 U. S. 115, 129.  Pp. 19–22. 

542 F. Supp. 3d 1, affirmed.