Congress did not introduce any constitutional infirmity into the statutory scheme. That exception is limited to a narrow category of calls less severely on Consumer Privacy than does the typical automated call and serve a countervailing interest. Theres been a good deal of backandforth about whether responding to challenges exceptioniewed as the or the general automated call. I think in steer circumstances like this is not a wrong way or wrong way, there simply two conceptually distinct analytical ways of challenging a law that includes a basic prescription. Here we think both challenges couldve been brought in both would fail. Id like to focus on the asserting,hich it is the challenge respondents are asking the court to focus on. The challenge on the automated call restriction. The theory is the government exception taken in combination with other aspects of the statutory scheme prevents the automated call restriction from performing its Consumer Protection function. The firstld under amendment. We think that is wrong. If you look at the statute. The only other exceptions to the automated call are those for emergency calls and calls made with the prior express consent and respondents have not contended that either of those ora First Amendment problem passed on of the efficacy of the underlying. Points toyour basic avoid strict scrutiny under the First Amendment is that you are not really looking at the content of the communication in this case, but rather its more properly viewed as part of an economic relationship. I dont see how that gets you category, youtent still have to look carefully at decide whether the phone call was covered by the provision or not and i think a clear holding of our decision. Let me address that first and foremost. The courts analysis after the statement of the case. The court described contentbased laws as those the target speech based on its communicative content. On automatedng now call restriction, the provision ,f the statute respondents say its impossible to say that that restriction targets them based on the communicative content. , the town had 23 different categories of signs coding. A multitude of different categories. One of them was temporary directional signs and that was the category of signs the plaintiffs wanted to put up. You could tell from the content of the sign what each category fell into at which strips and supplied. The courtrcumstance held that targeted based on the communicative content of their signs. Here, you respondents havent been targeted in the meaningful sense. Political indications are subject to the same restrictions that apply to the vast majority of automated calls. I would like to jump ahead and get to the severance question. You say if this exception for Government Debt is found to be problematic you should sever that and keep the rest of the statute. Its because they are illegal. Here there is nothing illegal about the Government Debt exception. When combined with the rest of the statute makes the statute vulnerable. Why the whole statute shouldnt fall. Look at thertant to temporal sequence the produce the current state of affairs. Separate public law in 2015. What your second point . Mr. Stewart the ultimate question is one of congressional intent, what result would congress have preferred and the focus is what congress would likely have preferred it seems like the tail wagging the dog to say we will treat congresss desire from these restrictions. Preeminence over congresss desire to protect all consumers from all other automated calls. Thank you counsel. Justice thomas. Justice thomas it would seem a bit odd you suggest we sever the exception, but here it didnt seem this remedy give anything to respondent, it doesnt add before any speech for that responded at it seems to be taking speech away from someone who is not in this case. Truetewart that may be but the courts task in determining the appropriate remedy is to follow established , to look into congress is likely intent congress likely intent. Thes not a reason severability analysis. That a plaintiff can only achieve victory on those two legal questions. On both the merits of the claim and the appropriate remedy and the court holds youve established the existence of a violation but the statute read properly simply doesnt authorize the remedy you seek. Thats one of the chances the plaintiff takes on a claim that depends on prevailing on separate legal propositions. They persuaded them to one proposition but didnt to a second proposition essential to getting what they wanted that thats not an unusual situation under the law. Thomas just asking a question about your scrutiny analysis. You seem to focus on the interest the individual has in privacy of the cell phone. It would seem to me that that privacy interest is not nearly as a person would have in a or even phone at home someone knocking on their front door. At the time the statute was enacted, cell phones were a lot less prevalent and were used on rare occasions and most people did not own them. As wek now cell phones explained in the reply brief, they are ubiquitous, a natural part of daily life for most individuals. Greateracy interest is than the Residential Landline. Yes of the phone rings at home and you happen to be there it may be an intrusion. But virtually all people when they are home will have their cell phones with them. So unwanted calls through cell phones would pose the same threat to residential privacy as calls to landlines wood. Ld. Addition landlines wou the effective automated calls to cell phones is not just potentially disturbed residential privacy, potentially disturbing them at work, social for any reason they may want to be open to calls from friends or family members. Thank you counsel. Justice ginsburg . Justice ginsburg i dont see how you can escape content based distinction. Content is a debt owed. O a government then the call is ok. If the message is please contribute to our principal d. Ganization, that his banne its based on what the messages. Pay the government what you owe or contribute to our political organization. As we setting our briefs, it is true that often a court, in determining whether Government Debt exception would apply would look to the content of the call but wouldnt look exclusively. For instance determination whether a particular debt collected was owed or guaranteed by the federal government, it would depend on the financial relationship between the debtor and the federal government. It is characteristic in legal culture that congress would enact statutes that regulate Communications Made in particular fields of Economic Activity and so you have laws that regulate what can be said or what disclosures have to be made in connection with the sale and subject to first amended challenge. Nobody thinks a rule like that is being especially suspect because they are limited to the field above security even though determining whether a particular communication was covered. It would need to look in part at the content of the medication. Switching to the severance. That would leave the political groups with no incentive at all to assert their First Amendment claim. Theyre going to lose at the end of the day. Why should they bother challenging, why should they bother with the first amended claim when it will be unsuccessful at the severance stage. As i was indicating earlier. Argue thatntitled to the appropriate remedy if there was a constitutional violation was to strike down the restriction but they didnt persuade the court of appeals on that question. If the application of ordinary severance principles which confirm that result than the courts duty is to follow those principles even if it leaves the plaintiff without a remedy. Justice breyer. What your last statement and Justice Ginsburg seems to ask is somewhat philosophical question which you need not answer if you dont want to. What is content discrimination . All human life is carried out through speech. All government regulation is carried out through speech. Filledingle statute is with all kinds of content discrimination. Every agency deals with nothing but what it applies to her the exceptions. I always thought that was in justice brandeiss third category. So how in your view do you distinguish between what is in that third category, what is in the first category, how . What is your way of doing it . Mr. Stewart i dont think we have a nice distinct tests but i would point or remind the court the guideposts that it stepped up set up. If you can tell exclusively from the content of a message of a particular law applies the mets very likely youre almost certain to be content based. The second is referring to earlier referring to contentbased laws as target space speech based on its community of content. Even if you thought the exception was content based. The automated call restriction does not target speech because of its content, it treats the class of speech the same and exempt from regulation of a small category of speech. Whatever the right answer is, it fact the that the mere particular law is limited to speech that is used in a particular activity, that limitation cannot by itself be sufficient to render the law content based or subject it to certain scrutiny because that would cast doubt on the vast array of laws that congress and state legislators have access have at the. Enacted. Justice alito. The socalled severability issue in this case is fascinating. Assuming for the sake of get to thatt we do question, what is your best precedent for the application of a severability analysis in a arguably ahis where regulation of speech is unconstitutional only because it contains a contentbased or review point based exception . I dont think either side has a precedent that was specifically in the First Amendment area whether severability a principal should apply and how it should apply. Best precedents are places like morale us santana morale is Santana Morales santana. Where deciding if an exception could be considered or the underlying rule should be struck down, you look at things like the temporal sequence in which the laws were enacted. The degree of the rule. Where the First Amendment claim is this persons speech is being treated differently from another person speech. What is your response to this counterargument in an equal protection case where the complaining party is objecting to his unequal treatment. Was severalremedy levels down, the complaint party gets what it wants mainly equal treatment wears a free speech case where the complaining party is objecting to is a restriction on its speech and if we apply this severability analysis in that situation, the party does not get what it wants which is the i think with respect, that could explain what the completes with what the party wants with whats is entitled to. For instance, there is no question of what the complaining party wanting an morale is, citizenship. It wanted to be able to the plaintiff wanted to be able to vote on behalf of his father, invoke the constitutional right unwedal treatment to fathers and unwed mothers. Legalaim is that i have a entitlements of equal treatment, but what the plaintiff wanted was citizenship. He did not get it as a result of the court. He said we applied established principles of severability in order to based on what congress would have intended, and even though you have established a violation of the rights to equal treatment, you are not entitled to the plaque to the practical result. Thank you cancel, Justice Sotomayor . The difficulty in my mind has been touched upon by justice alito. Assume that i do think, not that i think, but that this will be conscious based. I dont see in the rhetoric any evidence by you of how small this exception is. The other side says that most of the complaints to the ftc are because of Debt Collection. But there are no statistics about how big or small debt tolection is with respect robo calls generally, or with respect to consumer collection. And even if you could show me that they were a small part of the intrusions on people, they are certainly a big emotional complaint. Because they generate the most ire by citizens. Putting that aside, you have not governmentbacked calls are any different than commercial calls. Private commercial calls for debt. In both situations, the debtor would expect the call in the interest of the governments claim. But so what . There is a discrimination aspect to this case which raises equal protection grounds. But putting all of that aside, given that the burden is on you, under strict scrutiny, to show that you have narrowly tailored contentbased,is then with all of the failings i have pointed to, how do you weigh it on validating this act . It would bethink impossible to make an empirical filling about the smallness of the exemption relative to the whole. What you would want to compare Government Debt calls to is not to other calls are actually being made in the world, because a lot of the calls that would otherwise be made are not being barred. What you want to be asking is small is this comparison how small is this class in comparison to the other calls that might be made if this was not enforced. With respect to potential discrimination between governmentbacked debts and collectors of other debts, the distinction we have pointed to is the collection of governmentbacked debts implicates the federal interest, and its not unusual for congress to propose federal Debt Collection efforts. Congress can show a tax refund or Social Security benefits, the private creditors cannot do that, or of the federal government has greater capacity to garnish wages, theres nothing problematic about that. The last thing we would say is that those of private debts could petition the ftc for an exception. They could say theres no good reason to treat us differently and you, the ftc, should exercise the authority to create an exception for all Debt Collection calls as to which the recipient is not charged. Then the fcc would grant or deny that. If denied there could be judicial review. There could be a targeted challenge thats primitive is premised on the differentiation. Justice kagan . Going back to what you started with, you said there was no right way to think about how to analyze this question, that we could apply constitutional analysis to the automated call the exemptionr to for Government Debt. Im wondering whether you could say a little more about that. We have to pick some way, on the one hand, the restriction is the only thing prohibiting speech. On the other hand, the exemption is the only thing that creates the constitutional issue in this case. Statute shoulde we look at . Is a hypothetical noted in the respondent brief which we think would be appropriate to focus on the exception. Is esizing that there on all automated calls except for those to a Residential Land which endorse the reelection of donald trump, and are approved by the trump campaign. We think an exception like that, for calls made to endorse a single political candidate would surely violate the First Amendment. It would be not only content based, but viewpointbased and theres no good justification in terms of the rationale for the restriction. Court concluded that this was a small percentage of calls and this did not cast doubt on the credibility of congresss overall Privacy Protection objectives, even if it did not sit significantly interfere with the achievement of the objectives, the court would surely say this was invalid. Like that . Statute i dont think its like that. In the sense that its not viewpoint based to the point of that statute, but you have heard some arguments that the exemption is content based. So why not treat it the same way . At the very lowest you would treat the exemption in the same way that you would treat it if a restriction were imposed, based on the same criteria. If there were certain restrictions based on the collection of government backed strictou would not apply scrutiny for the reasons that ive discussed for the securities of laws. Respondents have understandably focused their attention on the automated call restriction, in part because of the severability question. Courty could persuade the that the exception was the invalid provision and it was struck down, they would not get what they want. But they have to establish the state prerequisites to show that they have a valid constitutional challenge to the automated call restriction. They might get the exception taken in combination with other features of the statute which makes it seem as though congress was not serious about protecting privacy. Justice gorsuch . Good morning. Some of my colleagues have noted the irony of the First Amendment challenge, leading to this suppression a more speech as a remedy. I wanted to explore that a little. You take the position that theres no right way to do severance here, but should we take cognizance of the fact that striking down the government not reliefion was that the plaintiffs sought in this case . And we normally take some congress cognizance of the adversarial process. Earlier foraintiffs not including all of the relief they might have wanted in their complaint. And what do we do about the fact that the plaintiffs seemingly have no standing to challenge an exception for Government Debt collection activities. They did not seek the relief and they dont have standing for this relief. Should those things tell us anything . It that way in the court of appeals and the court of appeals could have done it that way, the principal argument the respondents have made all along is that the Government Debt exception combined with other features of the statutory and regulatory scheme really calls into question congresss commitment to the protection of privacy, or prevent the statute from achieving that. And the court of appeals could just have said thats the only claim you made, i reject it, and whether or not you could have pursued a challenge to the exception itself. Think, given the court of appeals ruled that it as it did, we have confronted the argument on the merits. With respect to the standing question, with what the respondents have always thought thought as relief, and they clearly have standing to seek that, and