You don’t see this every day.

Great big article in the Wall Street Journal discussing how to stop political messages.

This is a real hot button issue. On the one hand the lawmakers want to be able to communicate with you. So they are loathe to silence themselves by expanding the reach of the TCPA to political messages.

Then again, the TCPA already applies to political messages in some contexts–even the Constitution can’t stop the lawsuits per Justice Kavanaugh–a fact everyone seems to forget about come election season each year.

Complicating matters is the new potential rule that elected officials can be held liable for official communications–brought to you by Andrew Perrong–even as campaign messages were always subject to the TCPA when sent using regulated technology.

And while many politicians continue to believe tat P2P texting is ok following an old FCC ruling on the subject, the Supreme Court tossed that rule in Facebook in favor of a rule looking at system capacity over “human intervention.” So the playbook being used to send most of these messages is, well… totally wrong.

The real brake on political TCPA suits is not limits of the law–or the First Amendment (ha!)–its that campaigns quickly go defunct at the end of the election season, leaving those harmed by unwanted calls with little recourse.

This has lead to the phenomenon of candidates being sued personally–just as Vivek!

But such cases are not particularly strong because the individual candidate may not have personally participated in the sending of the messages.

I don’t pretend to have the answer to any of this, just reporting on what promises to be an EXTREMELY active political calling and texting season and predicting massive fallout from a TCPA perspective–especially with the WSJ calling people (even normal people) to arms over this.