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Judge Rules Political Robocalls Are Protected By First Amendment (onthewire.io)
Trailrunner7 quotes a report from On the Wire: A federal judge has ruled that robocalls made on behalf of political candidates are protected by the First Amendment and cannot be outlawed. The decision came in a case in Arkansas, where political robocalls had been illegal for more than 30 years. On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Leon Holmes ruled that banning political robocalls amounts to an infringement of free speech protections and also constitutes prior restraint of speech. Political campaigns have been using robocalls for decades, and some states have sought to ban them, arguing that they are intrusive and violate recipients' privacy. In the Arkansas case, the state attorney general put forward both of these arguments, and also argued that the calls can tie up phone lines, making them unusable in an emergency. Holmes said in his decision that there was no evidence that political robocalls prevent emergency communications, and also said that the Arkansas statute should have banned all robocalls, not just commercial and political ones. "The statute at issue here imposes a content-based restriction on speech; it is not one of the rare cases that survives strict scrutiny. The state has failed to prove that the statute at issue advances a compelling state interest and is narrowly tailored to serve that interest," Holmes wrote.
It is "equally first amendment" to block them. The actual issue here is just that the ban singled out specific types of robocall instead of blocking them all. The Judge didn't say you can't block them because first amendment, he said you can't single them out to be blocked based on their content.
A federal judge has ruled that robocalls made on behalf of political candidates are protected by the First Amendment and cannot be outlawed.
It should be illegal for them to ignore the federal do-not-call list, and for them to call cell phones period. The First Amendment doesn't say I have to provide anyone a platform at my expense or my inconvenience.
The state has failed to prove that the statute at issue advances a compelling state interest
Wouldn't it be novel if a law only had to show that it advances a compelling CITIZEN interest?
The judge didn't rule that political robocalls couldn't be banned, but rather that you couldn't JUST ban political robocalls. Generally, content-based restrictions on speech face a much higher hurdle than form-based restrictions. If the law had banned ALL robocalls, it might still have been overturned, but by only trying to ban SOME robocalls, the law was banning speech based on its content (political vs. charity message), and that's a very tough hurdle to get over.
The state law closed the loophole the politicians left in the federal do-not-call system. Yay for the state.
The state could have accomplished the same end by banning all robocalls that the recipient didn't specifically sign up for. Since that wouldn't be based on the content of the calls it wouldn't be subject to this particular 1st Amendment challenge. By banning politicial robocalls in particular they guaranteed that the law would be found to violate the 1st Amendment.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I know it has been out of fashion for quite a while, but RTFA. In fact, just read all of the summary. The judges did not say that there is a general right to robocall your phone at any hour. What they said was that the government could not ban calls with a specific type of content -- in this case political calls.
Had the law enacted a ban on robocalls that was independent of content, it would have been OK.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!