The Supreme Court will hear arguments today in Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate, a case that could — just in time for what are projected to be epically expensive races in 2022 and 2024 — change how campaigns for political office are underwritten.

While candidates are free to lend money to their own campaigns, a provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, passed in 2002, capped at $250,000 the amount of those funds that can be repaid with money raised after the election.

In 2018, Senator Cruz intentionally lent his campaign $260,000 in the waning days of the race to establish the “factual basis” for a constitutional challenge to this provision and launched a lawsuit to recover the $10,000 difference between what he paid and what the law allowed.

Advocates for this limitation argue that it heads off the possibility of corruption after the official is elected, when regulations on accepting cash loosen. They point to the instance of Representative Grace Napolitano, who lent her campaign $150,000 in 1998 and has since raised more than $220,000 to pay it off, pocketing $72,000 in the bargain.

In winning a unanimous victory at the District Court, the Cruz campaign convinced the judges that “the loan-repayment limit burdens political speech and thus implicates the protection of the First Amendment.”

While the challenge to this law is fresh, campaign finance regulations have long been a feature of debates over the constitutional scope of the First Amendment’s prohibition on Congress abridging freedom of speech.

The debates have pitted, on the one hand, those who believe that spending money on campaigns is a core exercise of speech and, on the other hand, those who maintain that spending money generates a pay-to-play system.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in this case in a climate where the momentum seems to be with those crusading for fewer campaign restrictions. In a landmark 2010 case, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the high court held that laws limiting corporate, nonprofit, and labor union donations run afoul of the First Amendment. Just as an individual has a right to express an opinion, so does a corporation.

Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy explained that “the Government may not suppress political speech on the basis of the speaker’s corporate identity. No sufficient governmental interest justifies limits on the political speech of nonprofit or for-profit corporations.”

Even as Federal Election Commission data show that since 2002, fewer than three percent of candidates have lent their own campaigns $250,000 or more, this case is sure to have far-reaching implications for the big business of paying for political campaigns.

For many other candidates present and future, the stakes are far greater than Mr. Cruz’s outstanding $10,000.

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Image: Senator Cruz at the 2021 Young Latino Leadership Summit hosted by Turning Point USA in Phoenix. Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.