Owen, Enron & More Oh My

Excerpt taken from Molly Ivins 5.26.05 piece.

Right-wing Republicans fight to make the world safe from "judicial activists" by appointing Priscilla Owen -- the biggest, baddest, worstest judicial activist Texas ever produced -- to the federal bench.

Owen is so notorious for reading her own opinions into the law, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, then her colleague on the Texas Supreme Court, described her opinion in a parental consent case as "an unconscionable act of judicial activism." (For further irony, see Gonzales' subsequent attempts to deny that he was describing Owen.)

Each Owen aficionado here in Texas has his or her own favorite Owen ruling, but I always liked the one about the boy rendered quadriplegic by a defective safety belt, who died waiting for the dilatory Owen to figure out if a lower court decision that the manufacturer owed him enough money for his care was constitutional in Texas. Hey, sometimes it takes more than a year. But she's very pro-life.

In Texas, we elect our Supreme Court, which handles only civil matters. The pattern in Owen's decisions is to favor those corporations and law firms that contributed to her campaigns for office. One little gem involved Enron: Owen wrote the decision that allowed the company to escape paying $200,000 in school taxes.

In her 1994 campaign, Owen got $8,600 from Enron and $31,550 from Vinson and Elkins, the Houston law firm that represented Enron. Enron and V-E showed up in her court two years later, trying to get out of paying school property taxes. Not only did Owen not recuse herself -- get this -- she wrote the opinion that allowed Enron to choose its own method for property tax assessment, and lo, it cut its own assessed property value by millions of dollars.

Another fave: claiming, on behalf of a contributor, that property owners have a right to pollute the water supply. Moral: Judicial activism, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.