Texas Chief Justice’s Political Frustrations Preceded Bar Rebuke

The State Bar of Texas is taking Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Jimmy Blacklock’s (R) public scolding stoically.

Blacklock warned the State Bar to “remain completely politically neutral” at his first state of the judiciary address on Feb. 26. “The Supreme Court will accept nothing less from the State Bar, and we expect the Bar to live up to that high standard,” he said, offering little in the way of specific concerns. He again declined to elaborate when Bloomberg Law reached him for comment.

Bar president Steve Benesh of Bracewell LLP said in a statement after Blacklock’s speech “We agree with the Chief Justice that the State Bar of Texas should remain politically neutral, and that is what we work to do every day.”

Benesh declined to say whether he agrees with Blacklock’s implication that the Bar hasn’t acted politically neutral.

In the last four years, the Bar has pursued disciplinary action against three Texas Republicans for their roles in trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election: Attorney General Ken Paxton, Paxton’s top assistant, Brent Webster, and Donald Trump ally Sidney Powell, a Dallas lawyer.

All three defeated the Bar’s sanction attempts, with Paxton and Webster recently securing victories in front of Blacklock and the all-Republican high court after lower court defeats.

Following his victory last month, Paxton turned to X to blast the Bar, calling its disciplinary effort “politically motivated.”

Paxton went so far as to suggest “the possibility of eliminating the entity given how it’s tried to enforce its leftist political agenda.”

Blacklock in his speech didn’t mention specific consequences for the Bar. Rather, it sounded like Blacklock was “calling for the Bar to get on the same page as him,” said Randy Sorrels of Sorrels Law, the Bar president from 2019 to 2020.

“It sounds like the Bar says ‘We hear you loud and clear,’” he said.

Watching Blacklock’s speech from afar was Tony McDonald, a Fort Worth lawyer who in 2019 sued the Bar for funding certain programs he viewed as liberal with mandatory member dues. After a partial loss at the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, the Bar implemented certain policy changes to root out the perception of political bias.

“I thought it was appropriately aggressive in tone,” McDonald said of Blacklock’s speech. “The Bar complaint against Paxton was a huge mistake for the Bar—they were way out of their lane.”

Blacklock’s History of Frustration

There was a contentious line of questioning at oral arguments last September, shortly after Blacklock and the Supreme Court returned for a new term.

Among the court’s first cases was Webster’s, who had turned to the justices to stave off a Bar effort to sanction him and Paxton for filing a suit to overturn battleground state election results in Trump’s 2020 loss to Joe Biden.

Blacklock wasted little time in going after a lawyer for the Commission for Lawyer Discipline, the bar’s disciplinary arm. He accused the agency of “taking a particular view of that disputed political question and then insisting that the Attorney General of Texas take the same view.” He said they were siding with Democrats on the unresolved issue of whether there was a legitimate dispute about the results of the election.

“You don’t want to say it, but it’s obvious—the difference is political perspectives,” Blacklock said.

Blacklock went as far as to suggest sanctioning the Bar’s lawyer for bringing the Paxton complaint, only to backtrack and say he wouldn’t do it.

This wasn’t the first time the 44-year-old Blacklock, a sharp-tongued conservative who Gov. Greg Abbott (R) appointed to lead the high court in January, had gotten testy with a lawyer advocating to discipline an officer of the court.

Three months before that exchange, Blacklock published a scathing opinion favoring a Texas judge who refused to marry same-sex couples for religious reasons.

He directed his angst this time to a state commission that regulates judicial behavior, “which veered far outside its proper lane by self-initiating this victimless but politically and emotionally charged case,” he wrote.

In the concurring opinion, Blacklock called out his colleagues on the court who voted to remand the case rather than handing the judge a full victory.

“We could have all but ended this regrettable case today,” he wrote.

Despite this history, Blacklock’s criticisms of the Bar at the end of his legislative address last month was unexpected, following his advocacy of less controversial issues related to judicial pay and paralegals.

It’s “absolutely essential,” he said, “that the State Bar remain completely politically neutral in everything it does, both as a matter of substance and as a matter of the perception that its actions give to people on both sides of the aisle.”