By Jeffrey Blehar
Wednesday,
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment