Robocall ruling sends right message

Reaffirming the vital role of the Electoral College in presidential elections wasn’t the only matter the Supreme Court got right on Monday.

In a 6-3 vote, justices also ruled that a 2015 law allowing federal debt collectors to make robocalls violates the Constitution. But to political activists’ chagrin, rather than scrapping the entire statute, the high court just invalidated that provision.

The majority of justices correctly viewed this one exception to the overall prohibition on robocalls that showed preference for one group — federal government debt collectors — over all others.

That’s precisely what Congress did, according to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion for the six-member majority.

“Congress has impermissibly favored debt-collection speech over political and other speech, in violation of the First Amendment,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. Political groups “still may not make political robocalls to cellphones, but their speech is now treated equally with debt-collection speech.”

Although the never-ending stream of unsolicited phone calls beleaguered consumers continue to receive might suggest otherwise, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act was enacted nearly 30 years to do just that.

But in 2015, Congress passed the Bipartisan Budget Act, which amended that law; it allowed debt collectors to make automated calls.

The Justices’ decision wasn’t what political advocacy groups, including the American Association of Political Consultants, sought. Those groups wanted the entire 2015 law ruled unconstitutional, which would have given them the green light to unleash an irritating assault on countless unsuspecting Americans.

We can only imagine the millions of messages that decision would have enabled.

But thanks to the high court’s surgical removal of that one exception to the robocall ban, we’ve all been spared an onslaught of calls about candidates, issues, and political donations. We hope.

“Although collecting government debt is no doubt a worthy goal, the Government concedes that it has not sufficiently justified the differentiation between government-debt collection speech and other important categories of robocall speech, such as political speech, charitable fundraising, issue advocacy, commercial advertising, and the like,” Kavanaugh wrote.

It’s rare in this current polarizing environment when we can get most Americans to agree on any issue, but receiving fewer harassing phone calls qualifies as an exception to our national dysfunction.

Even FCC Chairman Ajit Pai commended the court’s ruling. “Thanks to the Supreme Court, the carve-out is no more,” Pai said in a statement. “Today, the Court found that the last Administration’s attempt to create a special exemption for favored debt collectors was not only bad policy but unconstitutional. I am glad to hear that Americans, who are sick and tired of unwanted robocalls, will now get the relief from federal-debtcollector robocalls they have long deserved.”

Along with the TRACED Act, signed into law in December of last year, we would have thought most Americans would now be insulated from those predatory, computer-generated invasions of their phone privacy.

That law gave the FCC more authority to go after the scammers responsible for unwanted robocalls by allowing that agency to sanction scofflaws the first time they break the law; it also extends the statute of limitations by up to four years in some cases.

However, we also realize a law must be enforced to have any actionable effect.

So, FCC, when you receive complaints about unsolicited political messages, or phone calls from Jamaica asking for personal information required to claim some prize, do something about it.