Hmph.
Two Chinese citizens who sued Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over a new law banning people from China and three other countries from buying property in the state do not have standing to bring a class-action lawsuit over the legislation, a federal judge said Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Charles Eskridge agreed with attorneys from Paxton’s office who said the two plaintiffs — Peng Wang and Qinlin Li — were not among the people who would be affected by Senate Bill 17.
Eskridge, from the bench, said he would deny class certification to Wang and Li, dealing a potentially fatal early blow to the lawsuit. However, Eskridge said he anticipated that his ruling would be appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, leaving open the chance that the new law could be blocked by the court.
[…]
Brian Ingram, a lawyer for the attorney general’s office, said the law isn’t meant to apply to people like Wang and Li who have permission to be in the U.S. The law is meant to apply only to “adverse governments and their agents.”
“It prohibits individuals who are domiciled in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea from purchasing property in Texas,” Ingram said. “It does not apply to persons from those countries who are domiciled in Texas.”
Ingram said there were carve outs in the law that allow people in Wang and Li’s position to buy and rent property.
Justin Sadowsky, the lead counsel for the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance, the group backing the lawsuit, said Ingram’s argument didn’t match what was written in the law.
“The disclaimer he was basically trying to make was that they’re not going to enforce this law against ordinary people,” Sadowsky said. “The problem is the statute applies to different groups of people.”
One of those groups is specifically foreign agents, Sadowsky said. But the law also specifies it applies to foreign nationals who aren’t domiciled in Texas.
The alliance argues that Texas laws prohibit people on nonimmigrant visas from being considered domiciled in the U.S. because the nature of their visa means they intend to return to their home country.
See here for the background. My interpretation of this – insert standard I Am Not A Lawyer disclaimer here – is that if Ken Paxton says he isn’t going to enforce this law against people like the plaintiffs, then they have suffered no injury and thus can’t sue. I can see the logic in that, but given that there’s a dispute over what the law actually says and that we’re going to have a new AG in less than a year and a half, I find it lacking as a justification. Even if you fully buy into Paxton’s promise, we don’t know how that will play out in practice, and the threat of being caught up by mistake or design seems to me to be enough to put the law on hold pending the outcome of the litigation. Not how the judge saw it, though. Maybe the Fifth Circuit will see it differently. Yeah, right.