Court upholds cellphone robocall ban
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday upheld a 1991 law that bars robocalls to cellphones.
The case, argued by telephone in May because of the coronavirus pandemic, only arose after Congress in 2015 created an exception in the law that allowed the automated calls for collection of government debt.
Political consultants and pollsters were among those who asked the Supreme Court to strike down the entire 1991 law that bars them from making robocalls to cellphones as a violation of their free speech rights under the Constitution. The issue was whether, by allowing one kind of speech but not others, the exception made the whole law unconstitutional.
Six justices agreed that by allowing debt collection calls to cellphones Congress "impermissibly favored debt-collection speech over political and other speech, in violation of the First Amendment," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote. And seven justices agreed that the 2015 exception should be stricken from the law.
"Americans passionately disagree about many things. But they are largely united in their disdain for robocalls," Kavanaugh noted at the outset of his opinion.
During arguments in the case in May, Justice Stephen Breyer got cut off when someone tried calling him. Breyer said after he rejoined the court's arguments: "The telephone started to ring, and it cut me off the call and I don't think it was a robocall."
Justices rule states can bind presidential electors' votes
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — In a decision flavored with references to "Hamilton" and "Veep," the Supreme Court ruled unanimously Monday that states can require presidential electors to back their states' popular vote winner in the Electoral College.
The ruling, in cases in Washington state and Colorado just under four months before the 2020 election, leaves in place laws in 32 states and the District of Columbia that bind electors to vote for the popular-vote winner, as electors almost always do anyway.
So-called faithless electors have not been critical to the outcome of a presidential election, but that could change in a race decided by just a few electoral votes. It takes 270 electoral votes to win the presidency.
A state may instruct "electors that they have no ground for reversing the vote of millions of its citizens," Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her majority opinion that walked through American political and constitutional history with an occasional nod to pop culture.
Such an order by a state "accords with the Constitution — as well as with the trust of a Nation that here, We the People rule," Kagan wrote.
President Donald Trump has been both a critic and fan of the Electoral College.
In 2012, he tweeted, "The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy." But in November 2016 after he won he presidency despite losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, he tweeted, "The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play."
Monday's ruling was not about the legitimacy of the Electoral College or an ongoing effort to effectively eliminate it by having states commit to support the national popular vote winner. That proposal, sure to be challenged in the courts, wouldn't take effect unless states constituting a majority of electoral votes endorsed it.
The court acted on another issue, whether electors are free agents regardless of what voters in their states decide. The justices scheduled arguments for last spring so they could resolve the issue before this year's presidential election rather than amid a potential political crisis after the country votes.
Kagan recounted how the Constitution's original rules for presidential electors sowed confusion because there was no distinction between votes for president and vice president. She noted that the results of the 1796 election gave President John Adams his political rival, Thomas Jefferson, as vice president, a situation Kagan called "fodder for a new season of Veep."
Things got worse four years later when Jefferson and Aaron Burr finished in an Electoral College tie, sending the election to the House of Representatives. It took 36 ballots and the influence of Alexander Hamilton to elect Jefferson as president, Kagan wrote.
"Alexander Hamilton secured his place on the Broadway stage—but possibly in the cemetery too—by lobbying Federalists in the House to tip the election to Jefferson, whom he loathed but viewed as less of an existential threat to the Republic," she said.
Those two elections led to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, which produced the Electoral College rules in use today, with separate ballots for president and vice president. "By then, everyone had had enough of the Electoral College's original voting rules," Kagan wrote.
When the court heard arguments by telephone in May because of the coronavirus outbreak, justices invoked fears of bribery and chaos if electors could cast their ballots regardless of the popular vote outcome in their states.
The issue arose in lawsuits filed by three Hillary Clinton electors in Washington state and one in Colorado who refused to vote for her despite her popular vote win in both states in 2016. In so doing, they hoped to persuade enough electors in states won by Trump to choose someone else and deny him the presidency.
The federal appeals court in Denver ruled that electors can vote as they please, rejecting arguments that they must choose the popular-vote winner. In Washington, the state Supreme Court upheld $1,000 fines against the three electors and rejected their claims.
The Supreme Court affirmed the Washington decision and reversed the ruling from Colorado.
In all, there were 10 faithless electors in 2016, including a fourth in Washington, a Democratic elector in Hawaii and two Republican electors in Texas. In addition, Democratic electors who said they would not vote for Clinton were replaced in Maine and Minnesota.
The closest Electoral College margin in recent years was in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush received 271 votes to 266 for Democrat Al Gore. One elector from Washington, D.C., left her ballot blank.
The Supreme Court played a decisive role in that election, ending a recount in Florida, where Bush held a 537-vote margin out of 6 million ballots cast.
The justices scheduled separate arguments in the Washington and Colorado cases after Justice Sonia Sotomayor belatedly removed herself from the Colorado case because she knows one of the plaintiffs.
In asking the Supreme Court to rule that states can require electors to vote for the state winner, Colorado had urged the justices not to wait until "the heat of a close presidential election."
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who argued his state's case at the Supreme Court, called the outcome "a win for orderly elections and our constitutional democracy."
Reacting to the decision Monday, the lawyer for the electors who challenged the state rules said he's glad the court acted now. "Obviously, we don't believe the Court has interpreted the Constitution correctly. But we are happy that we have achieved our primary objective — this uncertainty has been removed. That is progress," lawyer Lawrence Lessig said.
Court deals blow to Keystone oil pipeline project
By Matthew Brown
Associated Press
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court handed another setback to the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline from Canada on Monday by keeping in place a lower court ruling that blocked a key environmental permit for the project.
Canadian company TC Energy needs the permit to continue building the long-disputed pipeline across U.S. rivers and streams. Without it, the project that has been heavily promoted by President Donald Trump faces more delay just as work on it had finally begun this year following years of courtroom battles.
Monday's Supreme Court order also put on hold an earlier court ruling out of Montana as it pertains to other oil and gas pipelines across the nation.
That's a sliver of good news for an industry that just suffered two other blows — Sunday's cancellation of the $8 billion Atlantic Coast gas pipeline in the Southeast and a Monday ruling that shut down the Dakota Access oil pipeline in North Dakota.
In the Keystone case, an April ruling from U.S. District Judge Brian Morris in Montana had threatened to delay not just Keystone but more than 70 pipeline projects across the U.S., and add as much as $2 billion in costs, according to industry representatives.
Morris agreed with environmentalists who contended a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers construction permit program was allowing companies to skirt responsibility for damage done to water bodies.
But the Trump administration and industry attorneys argued the permit, in place since the 1970s, was functioning properly when it was cancelled by Morris over concerns about endangered species being harmed during pipeline construction.
Monday's one-paragraph order did not provide any rationale for the high court's decision.
The corps suspended the program following Morris' April ruling. Agency officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
TC Energy spokesman Terry Cunha said the company is not giving up on Keystone, but it will have to delay large portions of the 1,200-mile oil sands pipeline. The company started construction last week on a 329-mile section of the line in Alberta. That work will continue while the company wages its court fight in the U.S., Cunha said.
An attorney for one of the environmental groups involved in the case called Monday's order a major victory in the fight against Keystone. But he acknowledged the plaintiffs had hoped to hamper oil and gas projects nationwide.
"Our focus was originally on Keystone, so we're very happy the court order ensures it can't move forward under this unlawful permit," said Jared Margolis, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
Pipeline industry representatives said the order means thousands of workers whose jobs were threatened can continue working. A coalition of 18 states had backed the Trump administration in the case.
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said the Supreme Court's action "ensures that one Montana district court judge doesn't possess the power to drive national policy on such a critical issue."
The order returns the case to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals for further consideration.
Keystone was proposed in 2008 and would carry up to 830,000 barrels (35 million gallons) of crude daily to Nebraska, where it would be transferred to another TC Energy pipeline for shipment to refineries and export terminals on the Gulf of Mexico.
It was rejected twice under the Obama administration because of concerns that it could worsen climate change. Trump revived it and has been an outspoken proponent of the $8 billion project.
TC Energy's surprise March 31 announcement that it intended to start construction amid a global economic crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic came after the provincial government in Alberta invested $1.1 billion to jump-start the work.
The company finished building the first piece of Keystone XL across the U.S. border in late May and started work on labor camps in Montana and South Dakota.
