High court upholds ban on cellphone robocalls
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a nearly 30year-old ban on automated calls to cellphones despite concerns that it violates the First Amendment.
To fix that constitutional problem, the justices ruled that a recent exception to the law allowing robocalls to people who owe the government money must be eliminated. The decision was written by Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh, with many justices agreeing only in part.
The ruling brought to a close an unusual case in which neither side sought what the court deemed the most acceptable result. Political consultants and pollsters wanted the original law declared unconstitutional, while the government wanted both the ban and the governmentdebt exception upheld.
Instead, as Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch quipped during oral argument in May, the result was “the irony of a First Amendment challenge leading to the suppression of more speech as a remedy.” He was the only justice to dissent from the entire judgment.
Still, that seemed preferable in the end to tossing out a popular law.
“Americans passionately disagree about many things. But they are largely united in their disdain for robocalls,” Kavanaugh wrote. By severing the exception for government debt because it made the ban unconstitutional, he said, “plaintiffs still may not make political robocalls to cell phones, but their speech is now treated equally with debt-collection speech.”
Kavanaugh noted the federal government gets “a staggering number of complaints about robocalls – 3.7 million complaints in 2019 alone. The states likewise field a constant barrage of complaints.”