A Sunday Sermon

Those are the final words in the press release of Sept. 14, 2004 announcing the Governor's appointment of Wallace Jefferson as the new Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

The appointment of Jefferson came one day before State District Judge John Dietz was to announce his ruling in the school funding case. The Governor's real message was in the timing.

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If when it takes up the school funding case July 6 the Texas Supreme Court is to deliver "the kind of justice Texans demand" , then what kind of justice will that be?

Will it be the kind of justice that demands from the state constitution a more clever codification of discrimination?--The kind of justice that a majority of our representatives are now demanding from voters in the next Constitutional referendum?

Or will it be the kind of justice that demands immediate and serious struggle against all manner of discrimination in public education?--The kind of justice that for the past decade has set the Texas Supreme Court apart from popular drift of the legislative mob?

To this observer, walking into the Supreme Court on July 6 is like walking into a gulley with high walls on both sides. Is this where Robin Hood will be ambushed?

If the question were idle to ask, why would the legislature not have solved the problem of school funding prior to June 1? Confronted by a history of court rulings that have demanded more and better education for Texas children, why did legislators merely settle for funding increases that Bloomberg today calls 'negligible'?

Yesterday's analysis by April Castro and Harvey Kronberg boils the difficulty down to a couple of egos, but we wonder whether one or both of those egos also have fingers crossed behind their backs that the Supreme Court will see the deadlock and yet give it a passing grade?

After all, it must be remembered that initial legislative drafts of the school solution were so obviously inadequate that is was clear from the beginning of the session that the Dietz decision would not be used as any kind of lawful guide. As the session started, so it ended. Bad faith in; bad faith out.

Rather than change the fact basis that was used by Judge Dietz to declare the school funding situation unconstitutional, the legislature has now frozen the evidence in place. None of the yellow ribbons around the crime scene have been broken.

In strategic terms, the care taken to preserve the evidence may result from simple egomania, or it may reveal a motive. Maybe the top three honchos of Texas politics (the gov, the speaker, and the comptroller) have reason to anticipate an ingenious new model of judicial logic?

Texas legal theory is getting quite a reputation these days thanks to Prez Bush, his shotgun counsel Alberto Gonzales, and his prized nominee to the federal bench, Priscilla Owen. It is torturous theory (pardon the pun). And we have the right to worry that it will define the legal history of our time—the kind of history that will be taught inadequately, inefficiently, and remorselessly in Texas schools.

As I wait for the Texas Supreme Court to hand me down ""the kind of justice Texans demand" pardon me while I shudder.