Not all losses in court are created equal.
Chris Bell
City officials will argue that the city’s election ordinance is unconstitutional as part of a strategy to strengthen their position in a lawsuit that could shape the early stages of this year’s mayor’s race.
After defending the city Monday in civil court, City Attorney David Feldman said he would write an opinion explaining to the City Council why its fundraising “blackout” rule is unconstitutional. A federal judge on Friday ruled that law likely violated the First Amendment.
A separate lawsuit by likely mayoral candidate Chris Bell, the subject of a hearing in state court Monday, accused the city of failing to strictly enforce its fundraising law. Feldman intends to take advantage of the ruling in the federal case to convince the judge in the Bell lawsuit that Bell no longer has a case.
The strategy, hatched in closed chambers by Feldman after more than an hour of heated debate in the 165th District Court, amounts to the city capitalizing on its own loss just days before.
“In the first instance, we have some obligation to defend the constitutionality of (city) ordinances,” Feldman said in an interview following Monday’s hearing. “But we have a ruling from a federal district court judge that the blackout period is unconstitutional. I believe he is correct.”
See here for the background. When the city said it would not fight the injunction in that case, they weren’t kidding. One wonders how enthusiastically they would have adopted the arguments from the Gordon lawsuit that they had previously opposed if the ruling hadn’t been handed down before this case went to court. Timing is everything in this life.
City officials said Friday’s decision made Bell’s lawsuit moot. If no blackout period is in effect, then Turner’s fundraising during that period is proper, the city argued, and there is no need to transfer any money.
Bell said he would challenge Friday’s decision in a new lawsuit in federal court.
It’s my understanding that there is a separate ordinance that regulates the transfer of funds from one account to another, and it is this ordinance, which was not addressed in the Gordon lawsuit, that is at issue here. That’s my understanding, and I’m not a lawyer, so if you know better please say so in the comments. Be that as it may, I do broadly agree that if the blackout period is illegal, then it makes no sense for Turner to be barred from transferring the money he raised in his State Rep account to a Mayoral account. He would have been raising Mayoral money last year if he could have been. Campos and Houston Politics (tangentially) have more.
problem is, it WAS illegal to fundraise, even if it is now legal, so Bell could/would not fundraise for himself, if Turner can transfer all those funds it still leads to an unfair advantage.