Sometimes it seems like a mistake to pay too much attention to what is said in the United States Senate. Even so, it was hard to ignore the spectacle of Ted Cruz, the highly mediagenic Republican from Texas, who took the floor on Tuesday to deliver a stirring speech with an unlikely twist. He spoke for nearly an hour, criticizing a constitutional amendment, sponsored by Democrats, that was designed to enable Congress to pass new campaign-finance-reform laws. Somewhere around the thirty-seven-minute mark, Cruz unveiled a placard bearing images of Tina Fey, Will Ferrell, and other “Saturday Night Live” stars, and suddenly he was defending a TV institution that isn’t usually considered a conservative cause:

“Saturday Night Live,” over the years, has had some of the most tremendous political satire for decades. Who can forget Chevy Chase tripping and falling over just about everything? Who can forget portrayals—Dana Carvey’s George Herbert Walker Bush, “Not gonna do it”?... Who can forget, in 2008, “Saturday Night Live” ’s wickedly funny characterization of the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin? It was wickedly funny and also had a profoundly powerful effect on people’s assessment of Governor Palin, who’s a friend of mine.... Lorne Michaels could be put in jail, under this amendment, for making fun of any politician. That is extraordinary. It is breathtaking. And it is dangerous.

Cruz is one of the Senate’s best and canniest speechmakers, and he surely knew that his not-awful imitation of Carvey imitating Bush would insure plenty of coverage. And his hypothetical outrage, inspired by the hypothetical imprisonment of Michaels, the show’s creator, seemed entirely appropriate during a week, and a year, when many of the Senate’s powers seemed hypothetical, too.

The proposed amendment—officially, Senate Joint Resolution 19—had been co-sponsored by virtually the entire Democratic Caucus, but it only avoided a filibuster with help from Republicans. A delicious Politico article laid bare the emptiness of the exercise. Mitch McConnell, the Minority Leader, objected that the proposed amendment was designed to fail because Democrats know they don’t have nearly enough votes to amend the Constitution. (Nevertheless, McConnell was one of twenty-five Republicans who voted with Democrats to allow debate on the amendment.) Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, seemed annoyed that Republicans had agreed to allow a vote on the amendment, even though he was one of its many co-sponsors. In his view, the Republicans’ willingness to consider this Democratic proposal was a kind of dirty trick—a way to “stall” the Senate and prevent it from taking up other issues important to Democrats.

The amendment, which is almost guaranteed to lose its up-or-down vote, is short and seemingly straightforward. It establishes that “Congress and the States may regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.” And it also places restrictions on corporations, along with “other artificial entities,” by specifically authorizing legislation “prohibiting such entities from spending money to influence elections.” But a wide range of activities can plausibly be said to “influence elections,” and nearly all of them require “spending money.” Cruz mentioned “Saturday Night Live” as a way of asking what activities would be excluded from such scrutiny. It’s an intentionally silly example, but it’s not a silly question.

The proposed amendment is in large part a reaction to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court case that struck down some campaign-finance regulations. Election laws had prohibited corporations from engaging in “electioneering communication,” a term designed to include broadcasts that specifically mentioned political candidates, and which occurred within sixty days of a general election, or within thirty days of a primary. The case concerned a documentary called “Hillary: The Movie,” which the F.E.C. judged to be single-minded enough in its excoriation of Clinton to qualify as an “electioneering communication.” Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, argued that the F.E.C. regulations violated its First Amendment rights.

In a famous exchange from the original oral argument, Malcolm Stewart, a Deputy Solicitor General, claimed that Congress has a broad ability to regulate corporate communication as part of its role in overseeing elections. Stewart suggested that Congress could, if it wanted, “prohibit the publication” of a book, if the book contained “express advocacy,” and if the book was published by a corporation. When the Court asked, controversially, to have the case re-argued, the government’s regulations were defended by Elena Kagan, who hadn’t yet joined the Court—she was then the Solicitor General, Stewart’s boss. She suggested that Stewart had been wrong: that Congress probably didn’t have the power to use election law to ban books, and in any case probably wouldn’t use it. “For sixty years, a book has never been at issue,” she said, adding, “Nobody in Congress, nobody in the administrative apparatus, has ever suggested that books pose any kind of corruption problem.” No doubt she meant to be reassuring, but there’s something unsettling about the image of government regulators determining which forms of media present a “corruption problem,” and which do not.

Kagan lost: the Court ruled for Citizens United, finding that the “prohibition on corporate independent expenditures is an outright ban on speech,” and that “political speech must prevail against laws that would suppress it.” The ruling helped clear the way for Super PACs, groups that can spend as much as they want on elections, from any sources, so long as they don’t coördinate their activity with campaigns. And the ruling frustrated many advocates of campaign-finance reform, who began to think that the only way to fix the problem of corporate spending in elections was to fix the Constitution.

During Tuesday’s debate, Al Franken, a Minnesota Democrat and the body’s only “Saturday Night Live” alumnus, called the Citizens United decision “a radical exercise of pro-corporate judicial activism.” He decried a system in which “a handful of superwealthy corporate interests, in effect, can buy our democracy.” In his remarks, Reid mischievously quoted a 1993 pledge from McConnell, promising that a Republican campaign-finance-reform plan would “keep wealthy individuals from buying public office.”