Election Law

If You've Received A Criminal Summons In Texas, It Might Just Be A Ted Cruz Fundraising Letter

This is a troubling campaign mailer, but it's also legal.

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(Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

When you receive a summons with an official county office listed in the space where a return address should be and the alarmist warning “SUMMONS ENCLOSED- OPEN IMMEDIATELY,” it’s likely to draw your attention. For people not used to dealing with the justice system, this sort of mailer can stoke anxieties.

But if you live in Texas and receive a letter like this, don’t worry, it might just be Ted Cruz asking for money.

This is, of course, entirely legal. In the world of the bizarro First Amendment that holds sway, imposing any sort of control on intimidating and facially misleading campaign mailers is an egregious Free Speech violation. The letter does say it’s from the Cruz campaign… just not in the place you’d expect. In that space, of course, it says it’s from the “Official Travis County Summons” office.

But for Cruz, who fancies himself a legal genius and sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, it represents a troubling lack of respect for the legal system writ large. The rule of law is a toy to be played with in his mind, its powerful tools just another pressure point to be squeezed to get his way. People will definitely open something that makes them feel like they’ve been charged with a crime, so that’s the new mailer.

Republican political strategist Craig Murphy told Politifact that, “These (appeals) are self-healing. If people don’t like it, they don’t give. It’s the most normal thing in politics. It’s the attention-getter.” And while showing contempt for your own potential voters is certainly a strategy, Murphy’s glib take isn’t exactly true. Even clarifying that the mailer is a Cruz fundraising effort, the format tries to draw a direct line between Cruz’s campaign and official government business. Can the “Voter Enrollment Campaign Division” put me in jail if I don’t give Ted Cruz a ten-spot? It erodes the sense that the election process isn’t run by incumbent campaigns. For that matter it erodes faith in the instruments of the courts — if this summons is a fundraiser, maybe the next one I receive is also junk mail.

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Those rifts are not getting healed quite so easily.

UPDATE: A reader points out that Cruz remains a member of the Texas bar (Bar No. 24001953) and members of the bar are bound by its rules:

Texas Rule 8.04(3) prohibits attorneys from engaging in “conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation.” The fact that it was his campaign, not himself, who sent the letters should not matter as 8.04(1) as the ethics rules apply to lawyers acting through the actions of another.

Interesting theory. Will anyone in Texas be interested in digging deeper? We’ll see.

TED CRUZ CAMPAIGN IS MAILING DONATION REQUESTS DISGUISED AS LEGAL SUMMONSES [Newsweek]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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