sentences:  The defendants argued that there was no state action and therefore no equal protection violation, because the Democratic Party was "merely a voluntary association" that had the power to choose its own membership.The Court, however, in a five to four ruling, reasoned that because the Texas statute gave the party's executive committee the authority to exclude would-be members of the party – an authority, the Court said, that the executive committee hitherto had not possessed – the executive committee was acting under a state grant of power.Because there was state action, the case was controlled by "Nixon v. Herndon" (1927), which prohibited state officials from "discharg[ing] their official functions in such a way as to discriminate invidiously between white citizens and black".