Justices uphold robocall ban
High court tosses exception for government-debt collection
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday broadened the federal ban on robocalls to mobile phones, eliminating an exception that had existed for government-debt collection while leaving the rest of the law intact.
In a splintered ruling, the court said the 2015 exception, which allowed robocalls if made to recoup debt owed to or guaranteed by the federal government, violated the Constitution’s free speech guarantee. Writing the court’s controlling opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that exception “favors speech made for collecting government debt over political and other speech.”
But Kavanaugh also said the court could strip out the exception without tossing the ban in its entirety.
“Americans passionately disagree about many things. But they are largely united in their disdain for robocalls,” Kavanaugh noted at the outset of his opinion.
The case, argued by telephone in May because of the coronavirus pandemic, only arose after Congress in 2015 created an exception in the law that allowed the automated calls for collection of government debt.
Political consultants and pollsters were among those who asked the Supreme Court to strike down the entire 1991 law that bars them from making robocalls to cellphones as a violation of their free speech rights under the Constitution. The issue was whether, by allowing one kind of speech but not others, the exception made the whole law unconstitutional.
The political consultants had argued that if the debt provision was unconstitutional, the entire ban on robocalls to cellphones must fall.
But seven members of the court said that was wrong. Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kavanaugh, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito in finding that the offending provision could simply be severed from the rest of the law.
It was the second time this term the court has found that a constitutional fault in a law did not mean it must fall in its entirety; the other involved the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Next term, the court will consider whether a court’s finding that part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional means the entire law must fall.
Two justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — would have found the debt provision was unconstitutional and that the proper remedy would be to allow political consultants and organizations to start making the calls.
During arguments in the case in May, Breyer got cut off when someone tried calling him. Breyer said after he rejoined the court’s arguments: “The telephone started to ring, and it cut me off the call and I don’t think it was a robocall.”