Opinion ID: 6495152
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: MALC’s Associational Standing

Text: MALC seeks a declaration that H.B. 1 violates Article III, Section 26 of the Texas Constitution and an injunction restraining the defendants from conducting elections under that law. MALC claims “associational standing” to pursue those claims on behalf of its members. Adopting the United States Supreme Court’s standard for associational standing, we have held that “an association has standing to sue on behalf of its members when ‘(a) its members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right; (b) the interests it seeks to protect are germane to the organization’s purpose; and (c) neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual members in the lawsuit.’” Tex. Ass’n of Bus., 852 S.W.2d at 447 (quoting 10 Hunt v. Wash. State Apple Advertising Comm’n, 432 U.S. 333, 343 (1977)). In other words, associational standing requires establishing everything that an individual plaintiff would have to establish, plus satisfying additional burdens that apply only to associational standing. To properly address MALC’s associational standing, we begin with a discussion of the constitutional provision at issue and the dispute about what it requires. Article III, Section 26 of the Texas Constitution, the source of the county-line rule, was adopted in 1876 and provides: The members of the House of Representatives shall be apportioned among the several counties, according to the number of population in each, as nearly as may be, on a ratio obtained by dividing the population of the State, as ascertained by the most recent United States census, by the number of members of which the House is composed; provided, that whenever a single county has sufficient population to be entitled to a Representative, such county shall be formed into a separate Representative District, and when two or more counties are required to make up the ratio of representation, such counties shall be contiguous to each other; and when any one county has more than sufficient population to be entitled to one or more representatives, such representative or representatives shall be apportioned to such county, and for any surplus of population it may be joined in a Representative District with any other contiguous county or counties. TEX. CONST. art. III, § 26. In Smith v. Craddick, we discussed the parameters of this provision: Representation in the House of Representatives is thereby apportioned among the counties of the state according to population. If the population of a county is so small as not to entitle that county to one representative, two or more contiguous Counties may be joined in a separate district. 11 When one county has a population which exceeds that which entitles it to one or more representatives, that County is to be apportioned to what it is entitled, and the County may be joined with contiguous counties for the district representative to which the surplus population entitles it. 471 S.W.2d 375, 376 (Tex. 1971). Under Section 26, barring any conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement of “substantially equal legislative representation for all citizens of a state”—i.e., the one-person, one-vote rule, which is not at issue here—apportionment of House districts is “by county,” and when the population is sufficient, district lines generally follow county lines. Id. at 377 (citing Reynolds, 377 U.S. at 533). In requiring that House districts be apportioned by county, Section 26 serves a markedly different purpose than the laws that ensure voting rights are not abridged on the basis of race. See, e.g., Voting Rights Act § 2, 52 U.S.C. § 10301(a). The parties agree that when a county’s population exceeds the number required to make up a single House district (dubbed the “ideal district size”), at least one district must be wholly contained within the county’s borders. They part ways on how the provision applies when a county’s population exceeds the number required to make up multiple districts—that is, when the population is more than twice the ideal district size. Cameron County, for example, has a population of 421,017, which is 2.17 times the current ideal district size of 194,303. MALC asserts that for a county with that population, two districts must be wholly contained within its borders (again, absent conflict with the oneperson, one-vote requirement). The Governor and Secretary respond that so long as one district is wholly contained within that county and 12 any additional districts are joined only with contiguous counties, Section 26 is satisfied. With those clarifications, we turn to MALC’s associational standing to pursue a Section 26 claim. The Governor and Secretary argue that MALC meets neither the first nor second requirement to establish this type of standing. As to the first—its members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right—they argue that MALC has identified no individual members who have suffered a particularized injury from the allegedly unconstitutional law. MALC responds that (1) its petition generally states that its members include the Texas House Representatives who represent and are residents of the challenged districts and (2) one of its members, Representative Alex Dominguez, currently represents House District 37 but, because of reapportionment under H.B. 1, is ineligible to run for reelection. Representative Dominguez is the only specifically named MALC member. His ineligibility to run for reelection, we agree, could constitute a particularized injury traceable to the challenged action if there were any indication that he intended to run for that seat but was prevented from doing so. However, as the Governor and Secretary note, Representative Dominguez is currently running for a state Senate seat, which is not affected by the county-line rule, and there is no allegation or evidence that he would have run for reelection in the House rather than for a Senate seat but for H.B. 1. Thus, the fact that Representative Dominguez no longer resides in District 37 does not establish a concrete, particularized injury traceable to H.B. 1’s reapportionment of the House districts. Moreover, Representative Dominguez resides in the new 13 District 38, which remains wholly within Cameron County. Our disposition today makes it unnecessary to resolve whether residents of a district that is wholly contained within a single county could satisfy the injury-in-fact prong of standing, but at the very least, a Cameron County resident of one of the other two districts would have a far less abstract injury. MALC fails to identify any other specific individual members. Instead, it generally claims that its members who are residents of Cameron County “have an interest in maintaining Cameron County’s representational power, which is embodied by the Texas Constitution’s county line rule,” and “that power will be diluted by splitting Cameron County unnecessarily into two districts extending in two different directions.” The Governor and Secretary note that Cameron County voters will still fully control two House districts, with 100% control of District 38 and 89.1% of the voting-age population in District 37. Accordingly, they argue, the reapportionment law has not caused any resident to suffer “a ‘vote dilution’ injury.” MALC responds that Cameron County residents, including two of its members, will nevertheless suffer a concrete deprivation of their constitutional right to two “whole state representative[s]” rather than “one whole state representative and two partial representatives.” This harm, MALC explains, is in the nature of “representational dilution” because “[t]he residents of Texas counties have their practical interests served better when their political representation is unified, rather than split apart.” As an initial matter, we note that to establish associational standing, general references to members are usually insufficient. See, 14 e.g., Summers v. Earth Island Inst., 555 U.S. 488, 498–99 (2009) (“Th[e] requirement of naming the affected members has never been dispensed with in light of statistical probabilities, but only where all the members of the organization are affected by the challenged activity.”). MALC does not claim that all its members are injured by the alleged “representational dilution,” and indeed it is possible that some members might be affected in contradictory ways, as we discuss below in assessing the related question of whether the litigation is germane to the organizational purpose. The mere likelihood that some member of an association would have individual standing has never been enough. If it were, the cases involving environmental standing would all have come out differently. Lujan, for example, involved minute dissection of two individual members’ standing. See 504 U.S. at 563–67. And in Sierra Club v. Morton, the Court did not dispute that the Sierra Club surely had some members who would have been aggrieved by the challenged development; however, without saying who they were, the Sierra Club could not satisfy the first requirement to establish associational standing. 405 U.S. 727, 735 (1972). These requirements may seem technical, but they are fundamental. Without standing, the courts cannot proceed at all, and the party who invokes the courts’ jurisdiction “bears the burden of establishing these elements” of standing; it is not the duty of the other side, or of the courts, to negate them. Lujan, 504 U.S. at 561. The lack of specifically identified members—who are then subject to scrutiny to ensure that they would in fact have standing on their own—calls into 15 question whether MALC has established the first prong of associational standing. Nonetheless, we can assume without deciding that MALC has met this initial burden. Moreover, if MALC’s substantive interpretation of Section 26 is correct, we agree that Cameron County’s residents are being deprived of their right, under the Texas Constitution, to two representatives fully devoted to serving the interests of those residents rather than the residents of both Cameron County and a neighboring county. That this harm is shared among county residents does not make it a “generalized grievance” that cannot confer individual standing. See id. at 575 (quoting United States v. Richardson, 418 U.S. 166, 171 (1974) (holding that resting standing on a “generalized grievance” is inconsistent with “the framework of Article III” because “the impact on [the plaintiff] is plainly undifferentiated and ‘common to all members of the public’”)). The Supreme Court has explained that such generalized grievances involve harm that “is not only widely shared, but is also of an abstract and indefinite nature—for example, harm to the ‘common concern for obedience to law.’” Fed. Election Comm’n v. Akins, 524 U.S. 11, 23 (1998) (citation omitted). The harm at issue here is not abstract but quite specific: Cameron County residents are allegedly entitled to two whole representative districts within Cameron County but, under H.B. 1, they have only one. If a Cameron County resident does not have standing to pursue a Section 26 claim, we struggle to envision a plaintiff who would. That said, we recognize that standing requirements render some constitutional violations particularly (and frustratingly) unamenable to 16 challenge. Richardson, cited above, illustrates this point. There, the plaintiff argued that keeping CIA expenditures secret violated the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that such amounts be made public. 418 U.S. at 168. The Supreme Court held that Richardson did not have standing despite agreeing with the contention that “if [he] is not permitted to litigate this issue, no one can do so.” Id. at 179. Voting in a lawfully apportioned district, however, is a personal right; participating in the political process is a fundamental individual liberty, not merely a generic and undifferentiated one. See, e.g., Khanoyan, 637 S.W.3d at 763. Section 26 provides the kind of right that someone will be able to vindicate. However, even assuming that MALC has alleged that at least one of its members has individual standing to pursue a Section 26 claim, associational standing requires more. The Governor and Secretary also argue that MALC fails to meet the second requirement of associational standing: that the interests it seeks to protect are germane to its purpose. Tex. Ass’n of Bus., 852 S.W.2d at 447. We agree. Importantly, to satisfy this element, the interest that is germane to the organization’s purpose “must also relate to the interest by which its members would ‘have standing to sue in their own right.’” Save Our Springs All., Inc. v. City of Dripping Springs, 304 S.W.3d 871, 886 (Tex. App.—Austin 2010, pet. denied); Mosaic Residential N. Condo. Ass’n v. 5925 Almeda N. Tower, L.P., No. 01-16-00414-CV, 2018 WL 5070728, at  (Tex. App.—Houston [1st Dist.] Oct. 18, 2018, no pet.). For example, in Save Our Springs Alliance, an organization (SOS Alliance) that was formed to protect the Edwards Aquifer and to prevent and reverse 17 pollution of Barton Springs claimed associational standing to challenge a city’s development agreements based on injuries to SOS Alliance’s members that were unrelated to increased pollution to the aquifer, such as increased traffic and decreased property values. 304 S.W.3d at 886. Because the members’ interests that gave them individual standing to bring the claims asserted were not themselves germane to SOS Alliance’s purpose, SOS Alliance could not satisfy the second prong of associational standing. Id. at 886–87. By contrast, in Hays County v. Hays County Water Planning Partnership, the threatened injuries that allowed the members of a community group to sue the county in their own right to invalidate a transportation plan—involving loss of property values based on the proposed development—were the specific “kinds of community issues” that the group was created to address. 106 S.W.3d 349, 357 (Tex. App.—Austin 2001, no pet.). Accordingly, the court held that the members’ interests the group sought to protect through its lawsuit were germane to its organizational purpose. Id. We agree with this required connection between the first and second prongs of associational standing. Without it, “an association that has an interest against a challenged activity [could] obtain standing by adding a member who has individual standing to sue based on his own unrelated interest against the same activity.” Save Our Springs All., 304 S.W.3d at 886. MALC has failed to make the requisite connection. MALC alleges that its mission includes “maintaining and expanding Latino representation across elected offices in Texas.” It further alleges that, although all three districts lying wholly or partly within Cameron County contain a Hispanic majority, H.B. 1 has 18 nevertheless reduced the Latino population percentage in two of those districts. In this way, MALC explains, its Section 26 claims are “germane to its organizational purpose.” But as MALC itself asserts, the injury that gives a Cameron County resident individual standing to pursue a Section 26 claim is the deprivation of the right to have two “whole state representative[s]” representing the interests of the county and its residents. That injury is shared by county residents regardless of race, and the county-line rule applies across the State irrespective of county geography or demographics. Indeed, one can hypothesize an application of Section 26 that would objectively cut against MALC’s stated purposes by preventing the placement of Latinos from different counties into the same district, thus diffusing rather than enhancing their political might. Thus, the injury that gives some MALC members standing to sue in their own right as Cameron County residents for a Section 26 violation is unrelated to MALC’s organizational purpose. MALC also asserts that, as a legislative caucus whose members are Texas House Representatives, it has a general interest in opposing unconstitutional legislation. However, MALC does not argue here that its members have standing to sue in their own right based on their duties as legislators, so again, the requisite connection between the interest giving rise to the members’ standing and the interest that is germane to MALC’s purpose is lacking. Accordingly, MALC does not have associational standing to bring its claims. Because MALC does not assert any other basis for standing, its claims must be dismissed for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. 19