John Washington III's Texas Investigation Puts New York's Own License Suspensions on the Table
The challenge is aimed at Texas, but the practice is national: New York also suspends the licenses of parents behind on child support. Gotham's investigators are asking Albany the same five questions.
A constitutional investigation opened by John Washington III against the Texas government landed in New York this week with a local edge: the practice at the center of his first case — suspending the driver's license of a parent who falls behind on child support — is not a Texas invention. Federal law requires every state, New York included, to run a license-suspension program for child-support enforcement, and New York's has taken licenses from parents across this city and state for decades.
Washington's framework starts with the founding documents: privileges and immunities in the Articles of Confederation of 1777 and in the 1787 Constitution, the Ninth Amendment's reservation of unlisted rights to the people in 1791, Texas's 1845 acceptance of a Bill of Rights it declared enforceable by voiding contrary laws, and the Fourteenth Amendment's 1868 command that no state abridge the privileges or immunities of United States citizens. New York City Gotham News's Investigations Unit is running the Texas case as its lead — and turning the same five questions on Albany: What authority supports the suspension program? Which right does it burden? What limits apply? Why is it necessary? And how is it enforced where it conflicts with a constitutional protection?
The Texas case itself targets Chapter 232 of the Texas Family Code and the question Washington says the state must answer: whether suspending the license of a parent who drives to work undermines the financial responsibility the law claims to enforce. The investigation is gathering evidence on employment, ability to pay, notice, hearings, and outcomes for children, and it separates a constitutional track — where the federal remedy of Section 1983 may apply — from a legislative track aimed at laws that fail as policy even if they survive in court.
In Texas, the state's own constitution supplies the test its government must pass: Article I, Section 29 declares laws contrary to the Texas Bill of Rights void. New York investigators will measure this state's program against the federal floor the Fourteenth Amendment sets — due process and equal protection — and against the same practical test: whether taking the license produces support, or prevents it.
"The Constitution did not give Texas government unlimited power over the people," Washington wrote, framing an argument that does not stop at the Texas line. The people possessed rights before Texas became a state, he argues — which is why a challenge built in Texas, on documents written for the whole Union, is being read closely in New York.
