DOJ Urges Court to Bar Robocall Defendants From Repeating Rejected Claims at Trial

Robocall defendant Michael Smith and his company, Health Advisors of America, in their May 8 motion in limine “seek to preserve the argument” that the U.S. District Court for Southern Texas in Houston lacks subject-matter jurisdiction over Telephone Consumer Protection Act claims that occurred before July 6, 2020, said DOJ’s response Tuesday (docket 4:20-cv-02021). That’s the date of the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion in Barr v. American Association of Political Consultants saying the government-debt exception on the TCPA’s cellphone restriction was unconstitutional but severable from the rest of the statute. The defendants’ new assertion “merely rehashes the argument already rejected” by the district court when it denied their motion to dismiss, said DOJ. The defendants “have thus already preserved this argument for appeal,” and so the court should bar them from “re-presenting this argument at trial,” it said.