The Supreme Court rejected conservative Texas activist Michael Quinn Sullivan’s complaint against the Texas Ethics Commission, further undermining his more than ten-year struggle against the state agency that oversees and enforces Texas’ campaign finance and lobbying regulations.
Sullivan has been appealing a $10,000 ethics commission punishment for failing to register as a lobbyist in 2010 and 2011 since 2014. Earlier this year, he petitioned the nation’s highest court to take up the issue. Sullivan was the former chairman of the powerful conservative lobbying organization Empower Texans. His attempt to overturn two state appeals court rulings that refused to throw out the fines was denied by the Texas Supreme Court last year.
In a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, Sullivan contended that Texas’ ethics rules, which impose onerous registration and fee requirements, infringe upon the First Amendment rights of “ordinary citizens” who wish to communicate with their elected officials.
“Sullivan’s actions went far beyond an average citizen who happened to visit with a lawmaker or who spent a day or two at the Texas Capitol during a legislative session,”
the Ethics Commission said.
The court’s decision supports the ethics commission’s appeals court verdict. Sullivan will go back to a district court for a jury trial to determine the amount he must pay.
After two former state senators complained that Sullivan had engaged in unregistered lobbying, the ethics commission began looking into the matter. For a long time, Sullivan has maintained that his work with the now-defunct Empower Texans was journalism rather than lobbying. However, such an argument was dismissed by the ethics committee. In their 2014 decision, they cited hundreds of letters he often addressed to Republican members to debate legislation and amendments, urging them to support the principles of his group.
Additionally, Sullivan released a Fiscal Responsibility Index that rates the conservative credentials of members according to their voting record in each session. In another instance of lobbying, the panel discovered that Sullivan utilized that scorecard to sway members’ votes while working for Empower Texans.
In court, Sullivan repeatedly tried to argue that the ethics commission lacked the constitutional authority to enforce the state’s ethical laws. By first claiming that he had moved to Denton County, Sullivan was able to have the case heard in a district court there instead of Travis County.
Even though a judge in Denton County ruled in Sullivan’s favour, the verdict was reversed, and the case was sent back to Travis County when an appeals court found that Sullivan did not really meet the residency requirements to have the case heard in Denton County from the start. The Travis County court decided in favour of the TEC. Therefore, Sullivan lost his appeal. In the meanwhile, Sullivan filed a number of further cases against the commission, all of which were dismissed in federal or state district court.
Many of the authors of these friend-of-the-court briefs, including those authored by Cruz, Cornyn, and Paxton, “appear to assume, without any real analysis of the record that Sullivan did nothing more than write a newsletter and work on a website that ‘rated’ legislators,” the ethics commission said in their response to the petition. These portrayals are inconsistent with the factual evidence that a Texas court grantedsummary judgments in favour of the Commission based on the allegations that Sullivan had broken Texas law.
