By: Jeffrey Blehar – nationalreview.com – March 13, 2024

Almost exactly one year ago, when the U.S. Senate was debating the RESTRICT Act — sold by its authors as a means of “banning TikTok” — I first savaged the app as an ungated cloaca of demotic sludge warping hypnotized teens with infinite content, and all but recommended taking off and nuking it from orbit as the only way to be sure.

But then I turned to the real issue, which was how repulsive the RESTRICT Act itself was, a sweepingly overbroad and alarmingly drafted mess that honestly read, with its vaguely general authorizations and ill-defined terminology, like a paranoiac’s fever-dream-come-true: Trojan horse legislation designed to allow an unaccountable executive branch to arbitrarily interfere with American political and social discourse in the name of vaguely defined “national security,” sold to us under false pretenses. No matter how serious the threat posed by TikTok — and it is a grave one, as ably summarized by the Editors earlier this week — I argued that it was not worth yielding such dangerous powers to the executive branch in what felt like an obvious invitation to governmental abuse. The Senate bill quietly died, and will thankfully not return.

I mention that because this afternoon, in an overwhelming 352–65 vote, the House of Representatives passed H. R. 7521, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. (Since PAFACAA is a mouthful, “the House TikTok bill” shall now suffice.) If passed by the Senate and signed by President Biden, the bill would force the Chinese owners of TikTok to either divest themselves of the property in a sale or face a ban on placing the app in online stores. Much depends now on the whims of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who can either schedule an expeditious vote or leave the bill to die during the hubbub of an election season.

Schumer should schedule a vote immediately, and this time around we should all be able to get on board. I urge all senators to support the House TikTok bill, and equally as important, urge all readers — particularly those who may be skeptical given recent public opposition (albeit muted) by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, among others — to understand why this bill is so much better than the one I vociferously opposed as a statist nightmare last year. It responds to all earlier criticisms and is properly drafted to achieve a wholly constitutional and eminently justifiable national-security goal — and nothing else.

As the Editors point out, initial counterarguments against the House TikTok bill from the likes of Senator Rand Paul were confusedly nonresponsive, vaguely invoking the First Amendment as a totem despite the fact that its interests aren’t even implicated in the legislation. The bill addresses neither the content of TikTok’s speech nor its time, place, or manner of expression — the proverbial “libs of TikTok” are wholly unaffected, free to gambol about their algorithmic hothouses as they so please (and as is their right). Rather, it focuses like a laser on the hostile foreign-government ownership of the data scraped from this and other potential future social-media applications. It announces its focus in its subheading and never deviates: preventing not just China but any future hostile foreign governments from amassing mountains of American user data (for use in either mass analysis and influence, or personal leverage and pressure).

As the bill moves to the Senate, the objections are now about its language being purportedly “overbroad” or “giving too much power to the government” — a rehash, in other words, of the same dystopian “beware the Deep State” arguments that actually were a genuinely relevant consideration in the earlier Senate bill I opposed. So I genuinely wonder if those critics have actually read this one, or are merely repeating lines fed to them by others they wrongfully trusted. You can read it yourself right now if you want, and it will take you less than five minutes — a solid indicator of its focus. (It is in fact so well drafted to avoid the pitfalls of the earlier bill that I sit here, as a longtime observer of clownshoes Republican legislative work, and sigh with pleasant surprise at how, for once, we didn’t screw it up.)

The bill is broader in its scope than just TikTok — both necessary to avoid a bill of attainder constitutional challenge and also sensible lawmaking in an endlessly constipated Congress — yet elegantly circumscribed within national-security boundaries. While specifically identifying TikTok as a “foreign adversary controlled application” it speaks to all such future applications, requiring them to be owned by a neutral third party under penalty of prohibition from American markets.

“Aha,” you might say, “but who defines what a ‘foreign adversary’ is? And how? You can’t trust the government to make those calls! What if Joe Biden decides to label Tucker Carlson’s webcast a foreign-adversary-controlled application?” Don’t worry, that’s not how it works. Those nations are in fact statutorily defined under U.S.C. 4872(d)(2) as exactly who you would have expected them to be: North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China. If times change — let’s say we finally go to war with Switzerland, as they have long deserved — then under Section 2(g)(3)(B)(ii) of the bill, the president is required to not only give public notice of any such determination of a new technological threat but also report to Congress in advance, along with the reasons and proposed means of divestiture. Far from the bill giving too much authority to the executive branch, it actually seems to be an attempt — for once — for Congress to exercise lawful oversight instead of shirking responsibility.

There are no substantive arguments for opposing the House TikTok bill. The national-security threat TikTok poses is evident; the proposed legislative solution is effective, constitutional, and carefully circumscribed to prevent later abuse; and for once this bill has genuine bipartisan approval the likes of which cut across both party lines and even the factions within each party. (The 352–65 vote in the House today, with support ranging from hard-line MAGA conservatives to ultra-progressives, is evidence enough of that.) A lot of people with a lot of money invested in Chinese industry over the past few decades are now applying pressure on both sides of the Senate aisle to save the Chinese Communist Party’s most valuable data mine, as a way of saving their own skins. Don’t let them win. In a legislative era characterized by quasi-nihilistic futility, the chance has now presented itself for Washington’s lawmakers to actually — in the clearest and least arguable way seen in decades — serve their country.

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Source: House TikTok Bill Focused on Hostile Foreign-Government Ownership of Data | National Review