Today, the federal court for the Southern District of Florida dropped a paperless order in Doyle v. Florida Health Solution, Corp. 1:19-cv-24013-DPG. The Defendant filed a motion to dismiss or in the alternative stay the TCPA class action pending SCOTUS’ TCPA decision. SCOTUS will hear arguments on the TCPA’s existence May 6, 2020. The case docket is here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/19-631.html. SCOTUS will decide, whether the TCPA’s 2016 exception to automatic call prohibitions for calls made to collect government-debt violates the Constitution’s freedom of speech tenets, and whether the remedy is to sever the constitutional violation from the remainder of the TCPA, or something else.
The Doyle district court ruled on the docket: “This action is STAYED pending the Supreme Court’s decision in Barr v. Am. Ass’n of Political Consultants, Inc., 140 S. Ct. 812 (2020), and closed for administrative purposes. Either party may move to reopen.” The Defendant had argued in their motion that the SCOTUS TCPA decision could be dispositive of their case if the TCPA is struck down as a whole, even though the government-debt exemption was not squarely at issue. Great to see judges taking this stay approach.