Money isn’t leaving politics any time soon

Make Me Smart

Marketplace

News, Business

4.6 • 5.4K Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Remember the Supreme Court case we talked about last week, Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate? Yeah, we’re doing a deep dive on it today.

At the heart of the case is an obscure campaign finance rule that limits the amount of post-election day contributions that can be used to recoup personal loans a candidate makes to their campaign. It was intended to crack down on corruption. But the court sided with Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and said the law is unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds.

On the show today, Weiner talks about what this means for the midterm elections, the future of campaign finance and this court’s approach to the First Amendment.

Then, sales of new homes fell to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic. We’ll explain why this is exactly what we’d expect to be happening in the economy right now.

Plus, if you’ve forgotten some of the faces you’ve met over Zoom during the last two years, you’re not alone. Listeners have a name for that phenomenon. We’ll also get smart about lifetime warranties and bear spray!

Transcript

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0:00.0	I am ready. Born ready. Born ready, yeah. There we go.
0:10.9	Hello, I am Kimberly Adams. Welcome to Make Me Smart. Where none of us is as smart as all of us or so. We like to say or so
0:17.7	We like to say and and believe in point of fact. Anyway, I'm car result. It is today a single topic today the topic of which is
0:25.2	FEC the Federal Election Commission versus Ted Cruz for Senate. It's case that we touched on last week and
0:32.0	It's about the Supreme Court and campaign finance and now where do things go? That's what we're going to talk about
0:39.4	All right, the Supreme Court cited with Republicans and Senator Ted Cruz and basically said that a cap on using
0:46.5	contributions that come in after election day to pay off personal loans candidates made to their campaign
0:52.4	is on constitutional that cap is not okay on first amendment grounds
0:57.6	So previously if a candidate lent their own campaign money
1:01.2	They could only get up to a certain amount of that back and now that limit doesn't exist
1:07.7	Uh, and so we want to know what this means for the midterms future of campaign finance and and where the Supreme Court may be headed next in
1:15.6	It's a interpretation of the first amendments
1:18.4	Daniel Wiener is here to make a smart. He is
1:20.4	First of all, he's back. He's been with us before. He's also the director of the Brennan Center's elections and government program at
1:26.6	NYU New York University. Did you go to commencement? By the way? Did you see Taylor Swift in your case? Did you know I didn't oh?
1:32.6	I missed that my my niece was there. She said it was great anyway. Anyway, that's not what we're here to talk about
1:38.4	Um, so look what I know nothing of this
1:41.9	She get the commencement address and NYU graduate. I did not know that yeah, okay
1:46.0	Uh, anyway, anyway back to it. So uh, what did Senator Cruz say in front of the Supreme Court that got the justice to see things his way?
1:56.2	Well, uh, first of all, thank you for having me and I'm sorry. I can't offer commentary on Taylor Swift although I'm a fan actually but but well
2:04.8	You know, we'll move on Senator Cruz
2:07.8	You know, this I think the best way to understand
	...

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