Court Case Seeks to Eliminate Telephone Consumer Protection Act
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for guy_:
Is There a Constitutional Right to Make Robocalls?:
The Supreme Court has produced many memorable moments in its 231-year history, but today was surely the first time a toilet audibly flushed in the background during oral arguments.
Such is the reality of conducting Supreme Court business during the coronavirus pandemic. This week, for the first time ever, the Supreme Court began holding oral arguments over the phone. So it's fitting that one of the cases argued this morning was itself about phone calls.
Robocalls, to be precise. Federal law has banned automated calls to cell phones since the Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, though with limited effectiveness. (At the time the ban was passed, cell phones were a novelty, and seemed to merit special protections. In the years since, of course, they have become the default for most American households.) In 2015, however, Congress added an exception for cell phone robocalls seeking to collect on debts owed to the federal government.
A bunch of political operatives and pollsters took exception to the exception. Back in May 2016, the American Association of Political Consultants, a nonpartisan trade group, sued in federal court. They argued that by carving out special treatment for federal debt collection, Congress was regulating calls differently based on the content of their message-and in doing so had violated the First Amendment.
The strange thing is that the plaintiffs don't actually want to get rid of the government debt exception. They want to knock out the whole law, to open the floodgates on robocalls-and automated texts, which the ban also covers-from campaigns, pollsters, you name it. It's a wacky bankshot legal argument: when Congress passed the debt exception in 2015, according to the plaintiffs, it retroactively invalidated a law that had been on the books since 1991. (Among the plaintiffs' bedfellows: Facebook, which filed an amicus brief in support. The company is sick of being sued for sending automated account-related text messages.)
The case, Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants, is an appeal from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The lower court ruling gave both sides something to be upset about. The court held that the federal debt exception indeed violated the First Amendment. But it agreed with the government that the rest of the law could stay in place. The immediate result was arguably a win for the rest of us: the robocall ban survived, plus it now included federal debt collection calls.
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