I don’t agree with U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx about very much, but I am sympathetic to one of the bills that she has introduced this year. H.R. 116, the Robo COP Act, would prohibit robocalls with politically-oriented messages from being made to people signed up on the federal do not call list that currently restricts telephone marketing in the commercial sphere.

I hate robocalls. They’re obnoxious and impersonal, and they leave me with a bad impression of whatever person or product they are promoting. I think that it’s rude for an organization of any kind to call me on the telephone, asking me to get up and interrupt what I’m doing, just in order to listen to an audio recording, without the opportunity to speak to an actual person.

Still, I understand the reluctance some people have about restricting robocalls. There are free speech concerns involved. How can the government tell people that they can’t engage in a certain kind of speech, even if it is obnoxious? After all, what’s obnoxious to me may be useful to someone else.

The thing about the Robo COP Act is that it doesn’t ban robocalls. It merely gives people the power to say that they don’t want to receive robocalls. Freedom of speech does not create a right to be listened to. If the legislation banned people who wanted to receive robocalls from getting them, that would be a violation of free speech rights. Creating a mechanism for citizens to choose to create a shield between themselves and speech they don’t want to listen to isn’t really a constitutional problem.

The fact that the Robo Cop Act includes issue-oriented calls within the category of “politically-oriented messages” raises the stakes, as these aren’t necessarily related to any campaign for political office. However, the Constitution also guarantees freedom of association, which implies the freedom not to associate with people whose opinions one does not want to hear.

H.R. 116 has only seven co-sponsors – and that’s not a surprise. Political campaign operatives love to use robocalling machines, because they work with the assumption that any exposure of their candidate’s name is a gain for the campaign, and robocalls are cheap. Members of Congress seem to be loathe to impede their own access to cheap and easy campaign machinery, no matter how much it annoys voters.

There is something that voters can do to stop the practice of robocalling for political candidates, even though H.R. 116 won’t be signed into law. Voters can decide to call candidates when they receive a robocall, and inform their campaigns that their vote has been lost because of the robocall. When enough people provide this direct feedback to campaigns, the robocalling machines will be shut down.