Five and a half years ago, midway through oral argument in Facebook, Inc. v. Duguid, Justice Thomas posed a question that wasn’t strictly before the Court: “I know this isn’t central to your case, but I am interested in why a text message is considered a call under the TCPA.”

Paul Clement, arguing for Facebook, called it “an excellent question.” He observed that courts had “essentially updated the statute to keep up with the times.” And then he pointed the Justices to a friend: “there is an amicus brief by the Washington Legal Foundation that addresses this issue specifically.”

That brief made a simple point. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 regulates certain “calls.” It never mentions texts. No normal person who says “I’ll call you” means “I’ll send you a text.” Yet the FCC and a parade of circuits had swept text messages into the statute anyway, not through any close reading of the TCPA’s words, but through a “precedential cascade”—an offhand assumption in Campbell-Ewald, a conclusory 2003 FCC order, and then a game of follow-the-leader in which each court cited the last.

The Supreme Court in Duguid resolved the auto-dialer question and expressly declined to reach the texts-as-calls issue, assuming “without considering or resolving” that the TCPA covers texts. 592 U.S. 395, 400 n.2 (2021). The question Justice Thomas asked sat unanswered. Until this year.

In Steidinger v. Blackstone Medical Services, No. 25-2398 (7th Cir. July 14, 2026), a unanimous panel (Kirsch, J., joined by Judges Pryor and Maldonado) held that § 227(c)(5)’s private right of action—available to anyone “who has received more than one telephone call” in violation of do-not-call regulations—does not extend to unwanted text messages.

The panel’s reasoning will sound familiar to readers of WLF’s Duguid brief, though the court arrived there through its own careful, independent analysis. Interpreting the statute “in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment,” the court noted that a “telephone call” in 1991 referred to communication via sound—indeed, the first text message wouldn’t be sent until the following year. Text messages “do not reproduce sounds.” And the statute’s own structure confirms the point: the TCPA defines “telephone solicitation” as “a telephone call or message,” yet § 227(c)(5) authorizes suit only over “telephone call[s].” Congress knew how to distinguish calls from messages. It did so in the very statute at issue.

Perhaps most gratifying to those of us who filed briefs into the pre-Loper Bright headwinds, the panel gave the FCC’s contrary gloss “appropriate respect”—and no more. Citing McLaughlin Chiropractic, the court interpreted the statute as courts traditionally do, unswayed by an agency pronouncement that, as our brief put it in 2020, “would not withstand a gentle breeze.”

We claim no credit for the Seventh Circuit panel’s work, which stands entirely on its own. And candor requires acknowledging the decision’s limits. Steidinger is the first appellate decision anywhere to squarely decide whether § 227(c)(5) reaches texts, and it construes only that provision, leaving the FCC’s authority elsewhere undisturbed. The broader texts-are-calls consensus our brief challenged—built under § 227(b) atop Campbell-Ewald and FCC deference—remains intact elsewhere, and a divided panel of the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed it just months ago in Howard v. Republican National Committee. Whether the two decisions amount to a genuine circuit split is a question the Supreme Court may soon have to answer; a similar appeal is already pending in the Eleventh Circuit. This week’s decision is a first step, not a final word—but it may yet put Justice Thomas’s question back before his Court.

To be sure, spam texts are, as the Seventh Circuit put it, “undoubtedly a nuisance.” Our point is that only Congress can craft substantive rules that keep pace with changing technology, and judicial “fixes” reduce Congress’s incentive to legislate. When Congress wants to reach texts, it says so—as it did when it amended § 227(e) in 2018. It has not done so for § 227(c)(5).

Five years is a long time to wait for an answer, especially to a question about a 35-year-old statute. But in statutory interpretation, as in much else, the right answer is worth waiting for. Ours is a society of written laws. This week, the Seventh Circuit read one as written.