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6 

BARR v. AMERICAN ASSN. OF POLITICAL  
CONSULTANTS, INC. 
Opinion of KAVANAUGH, J. 

principles and concluded that the government-debt excep-
tion was severable from the underlying robocall restriction.  
The  Court  of  Appeals  therefore  invalidated  the  govern-
ment-debt  exception  and  severed  it  from  the  robocall  re-
striction. 
  The  Government  petitioned  for  a  writ  of  certiorari  be-
cause  the  Court  of  Appeals  invalidated  part  of  a  federal 
statute—namely,  the  government-debt  exception.    Plain-
tiffs  supported  the  petition,  arguing  from  the  other  direc-
tion  that  the  Court  of  Appeals  did  not  go  far  enough  in 
providing relief and should have invalidated the entire 1991 
robocall  restriction  rather  than  simply  invalidating  the 
2015  government-debt  exception.    We  granted  certiorari.  
589 U. S. ___ (2020). 

II 
  Ratified  in  1791,  the  First  Amendment  provides  that 
Congress  shall  make  no  law  “abridging  the  freedom  of 
speech.”  Above “all else, the First Amendment means that 
government” generally “has no power to restrict expression 
because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its 
content.”  Police Dept. of Chicago v. Mosley, 408 U. S. 92, 95 
(1972). 
  The Court’s precedents allow the government to “consti-
tutionally impose reasonable time, place, and manner reg-
ulations” on speech, but the precedents restrict the govern-
ment from discriminating “in the regulation of expression 
on the basis of the content of that expression.”  Hudgens v. 
NLRB, 424 U. S. 507, 520 (1976).  Content-based laws are 
subject to strict scrutiny.  See Reed v. Town of Gilbert, 576 
U. S.  155,  163–164  (2015).    By  contrast,  content-neutral 
laws are subject to a lower level of scrutiny.  Id., at 166. 
  Section  227(b)(1)(A)(iii)  generally  bars  robocalls  to  cell 
phones.  Since the 2015 amendment, the law has exempted 
robocalls  to  collect  government  debt.    The  initial  First 
Amendment  question  is  whether  the  robocall  restriction,