Opinion ID: 895269
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: This case concerns high-stakes issues far beyond chapter 149, principally how the Texas Constitution allocates governing power.

Text: Today's case is not merely about whether chapter 149 singled out Barbara Robinson and unconstitutionally snuffed out her pending action against a lone corporation. Distilled down, it is also a case about how Texans govern themselves. Delimiting the outer edge of police-power constitutionality has bedeviled Texas courts for over a century. The broader issue of a citizen's relationship with the State has confounded for centuries longer.  From 1651: For in a way beset with those that contend on one side for too great Liberty, and on the other side for too much Authority, 'tis hard to passe between the points of both unwounded. [18]  From 1851: It is much easier to perceive and realize the existence and sources of [the police power] than to mark its boundaries, or prescribe limits to its exercise. [19]  From 1907: The question whether a law can stand as a valid exercise of the police power may be involved in mists as to what police power means, or where its boundaries may terminate. It has been said that police power is limited to enactments having reference to the comfort, safety, or the welfare of society, and usually it applies to the exigencies involving the public health, safety, or morals. [20] Gauzy definitions such as theseand laments over such imprecisionoffer scant comfort in this enterprise. The issue is elemental, but not elementary. Fortunately, we are not entirely without guidance. Appropriately weighty principles guide our course. First, we recognize that police power draws from the credo that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Second, while this maxim rings utilitarian and Dickensian (not to mention Vulcan [21] ), it is cabined by something contrarian and Texan: distrust of intrusive government and a belief that police power is justified only by urgency, not expediency. That is, there must exist a societal peril that makes collective action imperative: The police power is founded in public necessity, and only public necessity can justify its exercise. [22] Third, whether the surrender of constitutional guarantees is necessary is a legislative call in terms of desirability but a judicial one in terms of constitutionality. The political branches decide if laws pass; courts decide if laws pass muster. The Capitol is the center of policymaking gravity, but the Constitution exerts the strongest pull, and police power must bow to constitutional commands: as broad as [police power] may be, and as comprehensive as some legislation has sought to make it, still it is subsidiary and subordinate to the Constitution. [23] Fourth, because the Constitution claims our highest allegiance, a police-power action that burdens a guarantee like the Retroactivity Clause must make a convincing case. [24] Finally, while police power naturally operates to abridge private rights, our Constitution, being inclined to freedom, requires that such encroachments be as slight as possible: Private rights are never to be sacrificed to a greater extent than necessary. [25] If judicial review means anything, it is that judicial restraint does not allow everything. Yes, courts must respect democratically enacted decisions; popular sovereignty matters. But the Texas Constitution's insistence on limited government also matters, and that vision of enumerated powers and personal liberty becomes quaint once courts (perhaps owing to an off-kilter grasp of judicial activism) decide the Legislature has limitless power to declare its actions justified by police power. At that constitutional tipping point, adjudication more resembles abdication. Whatever the police power's amorphous boundaries, we know these two things: (1) the Legislature may ask for private sacrifice, and receive itprovided the private rights sacrificed are outweighed in public good, burdened as little as possible, and amply justified on public-necessity grounds; and (2) the Legislature's police power is not infinitely elastic, able to extinguish constitutional liberties with nonchalance. Texans long ago and since have embraced constitutional, meaning limited, government. The judiciary thus has a superseding obligation to disapprove certain encroachments on liberty, no matter the legislative vote-count. Put another way, judicial review sometimes means thwarting today's majority from thwarting yesterday's supermajoritythe one that ratified our solemn Constitution. [26]