Barr v. American Association Of Political Consultants, Inc.

140 S.Ct. 2335 (2020)

Purchase the Printed Copy at bsmsphd.com

Nature of the Case

To access this section all you need to do is click here and register.

Facts

The Federal Government receives a staggering number of complaints about robocalls-3.7 million complaints in 2019 alone. The States likewise field a constant barrage of complaints. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, (TCPA), generally prohibits robocalls to cell phones and home phones. In enacting the TCPA, Congress found that banning robocalls was “the only effective means of protecting telephone consumers from this nuisance and privacy invasion.” Twenty-four years later, in 2015, Congress passed and President Obama signed the Bipartisan Budget Act. It amended the TCPA and allows robocalls that are made to collect debts owed to or guaranteed by the Federal Government, including robocalls made to collect many student loan and mortgage debts. Ps are political and nonprofit organizations that want to make political robocalls to cell phones. They argue that the 2015 government-debt exception unconstitutionally favors debt-collection speech over political and other speech. As relief from that unconstitutional law, they urge us to invalidate the entire 1991 robocall restriction, rather than simply invalidating the 2015 government-debt exception. Ps filed a declaratory judgment action against the U. S. Attorney General and the FCC (D), claiming that the 2015 amendment violated the First Amendment. The court determined that the robocall restriction with the government-debt exception was a content-based speech regulation, thereby triggering strict scrutiny. The court concluded that the law survived strict scrutiny, even with the content-based exception, because of the Government’s compelling interest in collecting debt. The Court of Appeals vacated the judgment. The court held that the law could not withstand strict scrutiny and was therefore unconstitutional. The Court of Appeals then applied traditional severability principles and concluded that the government-debt exception was severable from the underlying robocall restriction. The Court of Appeals, therefore, invalidated the government-debt exception and severed it from the robocall restriction. Ds appealed.