Texas high court hears challenge over medical board order limiting candidate speech

At oral argument before the Texas Supreme Court on Oct. 5, 2025, lawyers for Ray Gonzales and the Texas Medical Board sparred over whether Gonzales’s challenge to a board cease-and-desist order is time-barred under the Administrative Procedure Act and whether the board may restrict a nonlicensed candidate’s campaign speech that uses medical credentials. Mister Hughes, counsel for petitioner Ray Gonzales, told the court that Gonzales “wants is to be able to talk to voters about how his credentials support his public policy without, a state agency telling him exactly how he's got to go about doing it or threatening him with future prosecution,” and argued the board’s own rule created an alternative path for judicial review that contained no filing deadline. The respondent, represented by Mister Kraft for the Texas Medical Board, told the court the court of appeals correctly affirmed dismissal of most of Gonzales’s suit because Gonzales sued months after the APA deadline for seeking judicial review, and the petition did not seek the prospective injunctive relief described in Patel. Why this matters: the case raises recurring questions about the limits of agency power to police speech in political campaigns, how administrative deadlines and agency rules interact with the APA, and what remedies are available when an agency issues a cease-and-desist order against a nonlicensed speaker. Arguments over procedure, remedies and precedent dominated the hour. Hughes argued that the board had adopted a rule (citing former Texas Administrative Code §187.83) that invited direct appeals to district court and did not include a limitations period, so Gonzales reasonably relied on that path and could pursue an “as-applied” challenge seeking prospective relief. He told the court the rule’s text and the board’s procedures left a candidate without a clear APA-driven filing deadline. Kraft replied that the record shows Gonzales treated the APA as applicable—he filed a motion for rehearing—and that his failure to timely seek judicial review was not excused. “They knew. They knew the APA applied here,” Kraft said, citing the motion for rehearing filed 25 days after the board signed its order and pointing to APA deadlines in the record. Justices questioned how far Gonzales’s requested relief could go. The court pressed whether an injunction barring future enforcement of the Healing Arts Identification Act or the Medical Practice Act as applied to campaign speech would be redundant of ordinary judicial review or otherwise unconstrained. Counsel debated whether Patel (permitting some prospective as-applied relief) and Heinrich (on sovereign immunity and ultra vires relief) limit or enable different routes to injunctive relief and declaratory relief. The parties also debated whether the board’s cease-and-desist proceeding is a “contested case” subject to the APA’s review mechanism. Hughes argued the board’s summary-style procedures—limited discovery, board members acting as fact finders, and a lack of neutral adjudicators—support that the proceeding is not an APA contested case and therefore the agency’s regulation created a non‑APA path to judicial review. Kraft countered that the order met the APA’s features for final agency action and that an agency cannot create a free-standing right to judicial review independent of legislative authorization. On the merits of speech regulation, the court examined the scope of the Healing Arts Identification Act (HAIA) and provisions of the Medical Practice Act cited by the board. The board’s counsel described two theories: (1) statutory prohibitions on indicating the right to practice medicine without a license, and (2) HAIA provisions requiring a nonlicensed user of the title "doctor" to designate the authority for the title. Counsel for the board said the statutes are “relating to” regulation of the practice of medicine because publicly professing to be a physician is an element of the statutory definition of practicing medicine. Several justices expressed concern about drawing lines where campaign speech about a candidate’s background could be regulated. The court discussed whether labeling campaign speech as “professional identification” is workable and whether compelled clarifying speech (for example, requiring a candidate to specify that a doctorate is honorary or from a particular institution) raises First Amendment or practical problems. No decision was announced. After argument, the court took the case under submission. The record shows the board issued the cease-and-desist order, Gonzales filed a motion for rehearing 25 days after the order, and the court of appeals affirmed dismissal of most of Gonzales’s suit. What’s next: The Supreme Court’s eventual opinion will resolve whether Gonzales’s claims were timely and which procedural path governs review, and may clarify how far Texas licensing and identification statutes reach into campaign speech.