Court Should Dismiss Plaintiff’s TCPA Claims in Their Entirety, Says NRA PAC
Plaintiff Patricia Crawford’s Oct. 3 opposition to the National Rifle Association Political Victory Fund’s (NRA-PVF) motion to dismiss her first amended Telephone Consumer Protection Act complaint (see 2310040026) “skirts” most of the motion’s key arguments, said the political action committee’s…
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reply brief Tuesday (docket 2:23-cv-00903) in U.S. District Court for Arizona in Phoenix in support of its motion to dismiss. The NRA-PVF contends that the text message it sent Crawford, accompanied by a video file, isn’t a call using an artificial or prerecorded voice as defined under the TCPA. It also contends that the TCPA’s residential provision doesn’t apply to the NRA-PVF because it’s an exempted nonprofit sending a political, not commercial, message. No court has found that a text message violates the TCPA's prerecorded or artificial voice provision, or that interpreting the act to prohibit such text messages “would render most Americans TCPA violators,” said the NRA-PVF’s reply. Crawford’s opposition “vastly overstates” the case law, it said. It attempts to narrow the U.S. Supreme Court’s “TCPA-specific statutory interpretation teachings” in urging the Arizona district court to hold that a text message with a video file violates the artificial or prerecorded voice provision of the TCPA’s wireless provision, it said. Crawford’s challenge to the validity of the TCPA’s “residential-focused exemptions” fails because district courts “lack jurisdiction to consider the constitutionality of the FCC promulgated exemptions under the Hobbs Act,” it said. On the merits, there’s no dispute that the NRA-PVF’s text messages “were made for a political, non-commercial purpose” by a nonprofit entity, and thus are exempt under that provision, it said. The court should grant the motion and dismiss Crawford’s claims in their entirety, it said.