It’s Past Time for Congress to Insist upon Enforcement of Its TikTok Law

National Review Online

Friday, August 22, 2025

 

It was sound public policy for Congress to ban the Chinese company ByteDance from operating the social media platform TikTok within the United States. Even more importantly, it’s the law. It was passed with broad bipartisan support and upheld by the Supreme Court in January when TikTok challenged it.

 

The law requires ByteDance to sell TikTok or see it shut down. It allows for a single extension of ByteDance’s deadline up to 90 days provided that the president certifies that there is a serious deal on the table to sell TikTok. The 90 days passed months ago, and there has never been anything close to such a deal, yet President Trump continues to extend it without even a fig leaf of legal support. The current, lawless extension is in place through September 17.

 

The president is constitutionally required to enforce the law. He swore an oath to do so, and he should carry it out. But it is quite clear that he has no intention of doing so. The most charitable interpretation of this stance is that Trump sees the threat of enforcement as a bargaining chip in dealing with China. Instead, he has relaunched an official White House account on the platform — a platform so insecure that government officials are forbidden from using it on their phones. The Trump political team plainly fears alienating TikTok’s enormous user base or losing access to it. But the law allows the platform to stay in business if it is sold — and Trump won’t know how serious China is about shutting it down rather than selling it unless and until he puts some real teeth in the legal authority that Congress has given him.

 

If the president won’t enforce the law, what then? The Founders would have considered this an impeachable offense, but after three presidential impeachments and one cabinet secretary’s impeachment died in the Senate between 1999 and 2024, that’s not a live threat. Neither, at least so long as Republicans control Congress, are we likely to see threats to use other congressional points of leverage such as the power of the purse or a slowdown in executive-branch confirmations. That’s a shame, because Congress ought to act like a self-respecting coequal branch of government — especially given that the Framers expected it to be the first branch.

 

But if Congress won’t use its own power, there is still the power of the courts. Either or both House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune could seek a court determination that the extensions of the law are invalid. A TikTok competitor would also have standing to seek such a declaration, if there’s any social media platform whose leader is bold enough to cross Trump in court. Even if the statute’s language and the nature of executive enforcement might make it difficult to obtain an injunction, a declaratory judgment would make plain that the president is operating outside the law.

 

In a republic of laws, that should be intolerable.