Overtime rule latest to stumble in Texas

President-elect Donald Trump promised to undo many of the Obama administration's most ambitious regulations, but federal courts in Texas are doing some of the work for him before he even takes office.

A federal judge's injunction this week halted a Labor Department rule that would have made millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay.

Over the past two years, U.S. district judges in Texas have struck down or suspended five regulations, executive orders or actions, and guidelines -- including an action that would have allowed illegal immigrants who are parents of U.S. citizens to remain in the country, and guidance that would have expanded restroom access for transgender students.

The case over the overtime rule, which would have made an estimated 4.2 million people newly eligible for time-and-a-half overtime pay, provides some insight into why opponents of regulation conclude that litigating in Texas increases their odds of success.

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In an interview, the Nevada attorney general, Adam Paul Laxalt, whose state was the lead plaintiff in the case against the overtime rule, said that the coalition of states it led had elected to file in the Eastern District of Texas because the district had a reputation for handing down rulings quickly.

"That was what is known as a fast docket," Laxalt said. "The decision was made based on a bunch of variables, but we thought we may be able to get the quickest answer." Citing the Dec. 1 effective date for the new regulation, he said, "We were really fighting the clock."

The injunction in the overtime case, issued Tuesday by a judge nominated by President Barack Obama, has many advocates and legal experts concerned.

While federal judges in Texas are officially appointed by the president, not state officials, Senate custom gives the state's two U.S. senators considerable influence over the nominations.

"The judges that do manage to get nominated have to somehow pass through the gantlet of Ted Cruz and John Cornyn," said Richard Levy, the secretary-treasurer of the state AFL-CIO who served as its legal director for more than 20 years. "It has skewed the bench here in a way I don't think is probably likely in other places."

Even though the federal judge who ruled on the overtime regulation, Amos Mazzant III, was formally nominated by Obama in 2014, the influence of Cruz and Cornyn made it unlikely that he would be overly sympathetic to federal regulations, Levy said.

Still, the sweep of Mazzant's decision appears to have surprised even skeptics of the regulation.

The Obama regulation raised the annual salary limit below which workers are automatically eligible for overtime pay -- something that previous administrations, including George W. Bush's, had done several times since 1938 -- to $47,476, from $23,660.

In his ruling, however, Mazzant suggested not simply that the administration lacked the authority to raise the salary limit so high, but that no administration had the authority to establish and raise a salary limit of any kind.

Nothing in the law, he wrote, "indicates that Congress intended the department to define and delimit with respect to a minimum salary level."

Mazzant retreated from the implications of this statement in a footnote asserting that he was determining the legality only of the Obama regulation.

The administration is widely expected to appeal the ruling, given the extensive history of such increases, and many management-side lawyers said they believe that Mazzant was out on a limb.

"The Labor Department has been setting these minimums since 1940," said Allan Bloom of the law firm Proskauer Rose. "This is the first time that a district court judge is essentially saying you don't have the authority to do that."

Information for this article was contributed by Barry Meier of The New York Times.

A Section on 11/25/2016