Court Opinion

ID: 9683781
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 13:36:38.689229+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:44:28.084497
License: Public Domain

POPE, Justice,
dissenting.
The majority opinion has given us a new canon for the construction of constitutions. Without a vote of the people, long standing disregard for clear words of a constitution can override and amend it. The whole record before us consists of a petition naming some thirty-five agencies that plaintiffs allege are violating the constitutional prohibition found in Article XVI, Section 21, of the Texas Constitution. The court has upheld the trial court’s ruling on special exceptions and its dismissal of plaintiff’s suit.
The court’s interesting discussion about the meaning of words used by our constitution makers in 1876 does not come from these plain, clear and unambiguous words of the Constitution itself:
All stationery, and printing shall be furnished, and the printing and binding of the laws, journals, and department reports, and all other printing and binding . . . shall be performed under contract, to be given to the lowest responsible bidder .
I do not know, and the majority does not tell us, which one of the words under construction is ambiguous. It has to be either “All,” “printing,” “performed under contract” or “lowest responsible bidder.” We get the intent of the constitution makers from the words they used. They chose words that do not require resort even to the dictionary. They used sentence structure that is simple and easily diagramed. What is there to construe? By the use of recent history books aliunde the record, we are now told that the words by long standing practice mean:
All printing may be performed without a contract and without a responsible bidder.
The authors of the Constitution knew how to make and state exceptions to their mandate, and they did that. They declared that it was their intent that the prohibition would not apply to what was then called the Deaf and Dumb Asylum. The thirty-five defendants named in this action were not excepted. The circuity of the court’s reasoning appears from its rationale that a result contrary to today’s decision would mean that the State would have an abundance of surplus printing equipment, a thing which the authors of the 1876 document did not intend.
Long standing violation of the Constitution by the legislature itself cannot change the Constitution, as this court has previously held by its refusal of the writ in Terrell v. Middleton, 187 S.W. 367, 373-74 (Tex.Civ.App.1916), wherein the court wrote:
A wrong cannot be sanctioned by age and acquiescence, and transformed into a virtue. .

*271The will of a sovereign people as expressed through their organic law is supreme, and necessity, legislative construction, and legislative act cannot weaken, impair or destroy it.
Justice Cardozo once wrote, “We are not at liberty to revise while professing to construe.” Sun Printing & Publishing Ass’n v. Remington Paper & Power Co., Inc., 235 N.Y. 338, 346, 139 N.E. 470, 471 (1923). However desirable a result may be, we do more harm than good to the fabric of the law when we convolute simple words and a simple standard to mean, “It’s all right, because everybody’s doing it.”
I would affirm the judgment of the court of civil appeals.