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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Wendy Davis wins first battle in fight to keep name on ballot

By Vince Leibowitz of Capitol Annex

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Former Fort Worth City Councilwoman Wendy Davis has won her battle against three Fort Worth firefighters to keep her place on the ballot this election cycle–for now.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Aman Batheja has an excellent play-by-play here at the Star T’s new Texas politics blog.

From a strictly legal standpoint, I was intrigued about questions the firefighters faced over their standing to file the suit:

Deats got in a couple of sentences about the merits of the case before Cayce interrupted again, this time to ask about whether three firefighters have the legal grounds to file this suit.



“I believe the Supreme Court has made clear that simply being a voter or a citizen does not give a party standing to challenge the eligibility of a candidate,” Cayce said.



Deats then spent about half his time before the justices defending the firefighters’ right as taxpayers and citizens to file the suit, saying the case law on the issue wasn’t so clear-cut.



“If in fact the court were to declare that the Democratic Party members have no standing…then that means the only persons who have standing are the adversaries,” Deats said, trying to suggest that that would be undemocratic.

This is particularly interesting given that the court dismissed the firefighters suit on the grounds they didn’t have standing to file the lawsuit:

The Second Court of Appeals ruled that three Fort Worth firefighters had no standing to challenge Davis’ eligibility to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination.



Firefighters Javier Cerda, Cullen Cox and Rickey Turner had asserted in their lawsuit that Davis is ineligible to run because her council term ended Jan. 8, six days after the deadline to file for the March 4 Democratic primary.

While I think the firefighters case is as bogus as a six-dollar bill, I think it could be this very standing argument that could get them a hearing before the Texas Supreme Court and give the high court another reason to take up the case.

Although I believe the state’s highest court will also rule that the firefighters don’t have standing (if they did, it would literally open the floodgates to anyone challenging any candidate for any reason just to get them into court), the issue of legal standing to sue in a matter like this seems to be a fertile ground, given standing arguments played somewhat prominently in the early moments of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent hearing on the voter ID lawsuit, where justices questioned whether or not the Democratic Party had standing to litigate the matter.


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