Tom DeLay’s Redistricting

This chapter examines the Supreme Court case stemming from the issue of redistricting in Texas. After the 2002 election, Texas's congressional delegation consisted of seventeen Democrats and fifteen Republicans. After the 2004 election, the delegation was eleven Democrats and twenty-one Republicans. This change was the result of the 2003 redistricting effort demanded and orchestrated by United States House majority leader Tom DeLay. It completed the process of making Texas a Republican state. In 2003, Representative Joe Crabb of the House Redistricting Committee introduced a redistricting bill that would spark a legal battle between Republicans and Democrats in Texas. The chapter discusses the Democrats' legal challenge to this bill over the issue of gerrymandering as well as the winners and losers from the litigation.

Introduction

This book examines the impact of Supreme Court cases from Texas on the entire nation. It argues that the most important Supreme Court cases have originated in Texas, which help explain why it is Texas and not California that provides breadth and depth to constitutional adjudication. Texas litigants, lawyers, politicians, and judges all play important roles in the underlying interplay of law and politics at the local, state, and national levels. In all its facets, Texas offers a window to all constitutional law and the Supreme Court. The book shows that Texas's impact literally started at the beginning by precipitating a debate over national powers and then a war with Mexico, and that the fraught relationship between Texas, the nation, the Constitution, and the Supreme Court in the century and a half since Texas v. White has produced more constitutional law than any other state.

Conclusion

This chapter concludes that the book has discussed Texas's influence on all the doctrinal areas of modern constitutional law, showing that constitutional cases litigated by and in the state capture the major themes of the relation of law and politics in the entire country. In addition to representing all doctrinal areas of constitutional law, Texas cases revolve around the major issues of the nation, from race to wealth and poverty to civil liberties and the relationship of the states and the federal government to war. This conclusion summarizes some of those important cases, including City of Boerne v. Flores, an exercise in judicial review striking down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as it applied to states; Texas v. Johnson (flag burning); Reagan v. Farmers' Loan and Trust (railroad rates); Lawrence v. Texas (homosexual sodomy); and Roe v. Wade and Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt (abortion).

Freedom of Speech and the Press

This chapter examines Supreme Court cases that were filed over the issue of freedom of speech and the press in Texas. In 1943, the Texas legislature passed the anti-labor Manford Act, which required labor unions and union agents to register and file comprehensive annual reports, while also forbidding them from making political contributions. The Manford Act was immediately put to the test by R. J. Thomas, president of the United Automobile, Aircraft, and Agricultural Implements Union and vice president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The chapter first discusses this case before analyzing other cases that followed, including those involving John Stanford, Louis C. Acker, Ray Hill, and Billie Sol Estes. It also considers Allee v. Medrano, Texas v. Johnson, and the issue of license plates in Walker v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans.

From Discrimination to Affirmative Action

This chapter discusses the legal battles involving the University of Texas School of Law and its affirmative action program. In the wake of its success in 1944 in the all-white primary case, Smith v. Allwright, the Texas NAACP called for the integration of Texas's flagship university in Austin. Some months later Thurgood Marshall wrote a letter to Austin's only African American lawyer asking for information about how to apply to the UT School of Law. The chapter examines the Supreme Court case of Heman Marion Sweatt that produced a major stepping-stone toward Brown v. Board of Education, along with another case involving UT's undergraduate admissions that reaffirmed a state's right to implement affirmative action policies. In particular, it analyzes McLaurin v. Regents and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, along with the Texas legislature's response to Hopwood v. Texas in the form of the “10% rule.”

After the Voting Rights Act

This chapter discusses the legal battles over the issue on voting rights in Texas. The Voting Rights Act, with its preclearance requirements for the South, was adopted in 1965 and reauthorized in 1970, 1975, 1982, and 2006. A few days after the 2006 reauthorization, the municipal utility district (MUD), created in Austin, Texas, in the 1980s, sued the U.S. attorney general, claiming that it should be allowed the advantage of the “bailout” (from preclearance) provisions of the Act. Edward Blum was the man behind the lawsuit. The chapter examines the MUD case and the one that followed it, Shelby County v. Holder. It also considers the efforts of Republicans to prevent voter fraud in the state through voter identification, resulting in SB 14, or voter ID bill, in the Texas Senate.

The All-White Primary

This chapter discusses the legal battles sparked by the all-white primary that was adopted in Texas in 1923 and how the Supreme Court handled the cases. In 1923, the Texas legislature adopted the all-white primary, declaring that “in no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic Party primary election.” The legislation left blacks who paid the poll tax free to cast a meaningless vote in the general election. The first challenge to the state's all-white primary was initiated by Lawrence A. Nixon at the behest of the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and with the help of the national NAACP. The Supreme Court decision in that case, Nixon v. Herndon, is examined, along with three other cases challenging Texas's all-white primary: Grovey v. Townsend, United States v. Classic, and Smith v. Allwright.

Capital Punishment

This chapter examines Supreme Court cases that were filed in Texas over the issue of capital punishment. When it comes to executions, Texas leads the nation by a wide margin. Between 1997 and 2000, Texas executed 132 people—significantly more than any other state since executions resumed after 1976. After the executions of Michael Richard and Carlton Turner, the Court started chipping away at capital punishment in the late 1960s. The chapter discusses cases relating to the constitutionality of the death penalty, including Branch v. Texas and Furman v. Georgia, as well as cases that came after thirty-five states and the federal government passed new legislation reinstating the death penalty. These include Smith v. Texas and cases involving Johnny Paul Penry, Robert Tennard, Jose Ernesto Medellin and Humberto Leal Garcia, Bobby J. Moore, and Duane Buck.

Abortion

This chapter examines Supreme Court cases that were filed over the issue of abortion in Texas. Texas figured in two of the three major decisions on abortion laws in the United States: Roe v. Wade and Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt. The late 1960s witnessed the introduction of various legislative measures to reform abortion laws. Reform measures based on the American Law Institute proposal were initiated in thirty state legislatures, including Texas in 1967. The same year the American Medical Association backed abortion liberalization, abortions were first mentioned at the Supreme Court. The chapter first discusses the case about the right of married couples to obtain contraceptives, which an 1879 Connecticut law severely restricted, and another case, Griswold v. Connecticut, the third attempt at the Court to kill the Connecticut law. It also considers cases involving Roy Lucas, Texas's mandatory sonogram bill, and Texas Senate HB 2.

School Finance

This chapter discusses the legal battles over school finance in Texas. Texas was an Anglo-ruled state with two minorities as second-class citizens: blacks and Hispanics. Hernandez v. Texas and the history of discrimination against Hispanics illustrate why any desegregation remedies had to consider Hispanics as well as blacks. That was the ruling in Cisneros v. Corpus Christi Independent School District, but the major case involving Hispanics was not litigated as racial discrimination but rather as a wealth discrimination case. The chapter examines this case, which involved the Edgewood Independent School District that filed a lawsuit claiming that it has been discriminatorily treated under the Equal Protection Clause. It also considers two other cases filed by Edgewood parents including Demetrio Rodriguez, called Edgewood II and Edgewood III, as well as the legal tussle over property taxes as a source of school funding in Texas and whether education was a fundamental right.