Yesterday, we quoted South Carolina’s attorney general Henry McMaster as saying that since the Common Sense Issues robo calls seem to be against the law, they “should get some legal advice.”
When I asked the group’s executive director about this, he referred me to a two-page memo by the push polling firm they’re paying to do the calls, ccAdvertising. You can read it here.
The bottom line is this: the group says that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection
Act, which governs robo calls, had an explicit exemption for non-commercial calls. So far so good. But the law also allowed states to make laws that would close that loophole and forbid robo calls of all kinds, including political calls. Even so, the memo says, “states are responsible for defending their restrictions under the First Amendment.” Their stance is that ” the [law] and the First Amendment permit ccAdvertising to place prerecorded calls for a political purpose, without regard to state laws that purport to prohibit such calls.” In other words: you’re going to have to sue to stop us.
As I’ve pointed out, two states have sued the company — and both won. The company doesn’t seem to have suffered much, though. Maybe a $1 billion “hurting” would change that.