Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/19-631_2d93.pdf
Page Number: 35

Cite as:  591 U. S. ____ (2020) 

5 

Opinion of BREYER, J. 

applied  less  strict  standards  when  reviewing  speech  re-
strictions  embodied  in  government  regulatory  programs.
This  Court,  for  example,  has  applied  a  “rational  basis” 
standard  for  reviewing  those  restrictions  when  they  have 
only indirect impacts on speech.  See Glickman v. Wileman 
Brothers & Elliott, Inc., 521 U. S. 457, 469–470, 477 (1997). 
And  it  has  applied  a  mid-level  standard  of  review—often 
termed “intermediate scrutiny”—when the government di-
rectly  restricts  protected  commercial  speech.  See  Central 
Hudson Gas & Elec. Corp. v. Public Serv. Comm’n of N. Y., 
447 U. S. 557, 561–564 (1980). 

This account of well-established principles at the core of
the First Amendment demonstrates the problem with the
plurality’s approach.  To reflexively treat all content-based
distinctions as subject to strict scrutiny regardless of con-
text or practical effect is to engage in an analysis unteth-
ered  from  the  First  Amendment’s  objectives.  And  in  this 
case, strict scrutiny is inappropriate.  Recall that the excep-
tion  at  issue  here  concerns  debt  collection—specifically  a
method  for  collecting  government-owned  or  -backed  debt.
Regulation of debt collection does not fall on the first side of
the democratic equation.  It has next to nothing to do with
the free marketplace of ideas or the transmission of the peo-
ple’s  thoughts  and  will  to  the  government.  It  has  every-
thing to do with the second side of the equation, that is, with 
government  response  to  the  public  will  through  ordinary
commercial regulation.  To apply the strictest level of scru-
tiny  to  the economically  based  exemption  here  is  thus  re-
markable. 

I  recognize  that  the  underlying  cell  phone  robocall  re-
striction  primarily  concerns  a  means  of  communication.
And that fact, as I discuss below, triggers some heightened 
scrutiny,  reflected  in  an  intermediate  scrutiny  standard.
Strict  scrutiny  and  its  strong  presumption  of  unconstitu-
tionality, however, have no place here.