Supreme Court rules against law allowing debt-collection robocalls to cell phones

EvilEyeFleegle

Dogpatch USA
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Nov 2, 2017
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Twin Falls Idaho
About time...not only did they continue the ban on political robocalls..thank God!...But they banned all rebocalls to cell phones--now is someone could just come up with a fix for those annoying and illegal warranty calls..LOL!



"The US Supreme Court decided today that debt collectors can no longer make robocalls to cell phones (via Ars Technica). In doing so, the court has ruled that the prior provision to the law violated the First Amendment by favoring debt-collection speech over other kinds of speech.
The law cited here is the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 which prohibits almost all robocalls to cell phones. In 2015, however, Congress added a provision that allowed debt-collection robocalls on government-backed loans, which include student loans, mortgages, past taxes and so forth.

The American Association of Political Consultants and three other organizations filed a suit aimed to invalidate the entirety of the TCPA so as to make it possible to make political robocalls to cell phones. But six of the nine justices have decided to invalidate the 2015 exception instead, stating that the 2015 update “impermissibly favored debt-collection speech over political and other speech, in violation of the First Amendment.”

Additionally, the Supreme Court saw no reason to dismantle the TCPA, as it functions without the debt-collection exception. "The remainder of the law is capable of functioning independently and would be fully operative as a law. Severing this relatively narrow exception to the broad robocall restriction fully cures the First Amendment unequal treatment problem and does not raise any other constitutional problems," the high court said. Because of traditional severability principles, "the 2015 government-debt exception must be invalidated and severed from the remainder of the statute," the court said."
 
About time...not only did they continue the ban on political robocalls..thank God!...But they banned all rebocalls to cell phones--now is someone could just come up with a fix for those annoying and illegal warranty calls..LOL!
No shit! Fuckers call me saying that the manufactuers' warranty on my 1976 Chevy truck is going to expire soon.
 
Again I agree with the ruling but it's all moot. The law has never stopped robocalls.

A big mistake was, in the same act which implemented the Do Not Call list requirement, they took away the private right of action. Before that, anyone who could reliably identify the source of an unwanted call that violated the 1991 TCPA could sue the caller in small claims court, for a minimum of $500 per violation, with an option at the judge's discretion to increase that to $1,500.
 

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