A District Court judge in Louisiana has granted a defendant’s motion to dismiss after it was sued for violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act by making calls to individuals’ cell phones using an automated telephone dialing system, saying that any such call made before July 6 — when the Supreme Court ruled in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants — relinquished the court’s subject matter jurisdiction over the claims.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Creasy v. Charter Communications can be accessed by clicking here.
All but one of the 130 calls alleged to have violated the TCPA were made within the five-year window in which an exemption to the ATDS rule was in effect. In 2015, Congress amended the TCPA to allow the used of ATDS’s when contacting individuals on their cell phones — without first obtaining prior consent — to collect on debts that were owed to, or guaranteed by, the federal government.
That exemption was struck down by the Supreme Court when it ruled on Barr v. AAPC on July 6.
The defense’s argument was that the court lacked subject matter jurisdiction in the case because the Supreme Court’s ruling because the exemption and the law itself were “inextricably intertwined.” Put more simply, Judge Martin Feldman of the District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana said, “a restriction cannot possibly be content-based if it does not treat different categories of content differently; an exception cannot be unconstitutionally discriminatory without reference to the broader rule in which it appears.”
In making his ruling, Judge Feldman determined that 129 of the 130 calls — all of the ones that occurred while the exemption were in place — the entirety of Section 227(b)(1)(A)(iii) of the TCPA was unconstitutional, not just the exemption for government-backed debt.
“The policy implications of this finding are beyond the Court’s purview – indeed, any added likelihood that defendants may evade liability for robocalls that Congress would have preferred to ban from 2015 to 2020 is the unfortunate price of the Court’s enforcement of a constitutionally
dictated result,” Judge Feldman wrote. “It is for the elected branches, and not this Court, to determine whether that price is unduly high. Legislative choices have consequences.”
