WASHINGTON — The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted Wednesday to advance a bill that may grant President Joe Biden the authority to ban TikTok, the Chinese social media app utilized by greater than 100 million Americans.
The laws passed the Republican-controlled committee 24-16 along party lines, with unanimous GOP support and no Democratic votes.
Now that it has passed the committee, the subsequent steps might be determined by House Republican leadership, which controls what bills get a vote on the House floor. China policy is a top national security issue for the Republican-held House.
It was not clear Wednesday what a timeline for any TikTok ban might seem like, and a spokesman for House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., didn’t reply to questions from CNBC.
The Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries, or DATA, Act, would revoke longstanding protections that for many years have shielded creative content, just like the short videos on TikTok, from U.S. sanctions.
In its current form, it will also go further than that, mandating that the president impose broad sanctions on corporations based in or controlled by China that engage within the transfer of the “sensitive personal data” of Americans to entities or individuals based in, or controlled by, China.
And while the bill would permit the president to acquire national security waivers for specific cases, it’s fundamentally built upon a mandate.
Over the course of greater than 4 hours of debate Tuesday on 11 different China-related bills, Democrats and Republicans agreed on nearly each one. But when it got here to the DATA Act, Democrats strongly objected, saying it contained overly broad language and accusing Republicans of attempting to “jam” it through.
The DATA Act was first introduced in Congress just last Friday. As of Tuesday’s committee meeting, the bill had just one sponsor, the panel’s newly seated Republican chairman, Texas Rep. Mike McCaul.
Typically, a bill this recent with just one sponsor wouldn’t move to committee votes just days after it was introduced. However the alternative of which bills will advance through a committee is made by each committee’s chairman, so McCaul’s sponsorship was effectively all of the bill needed.
Yet at the same time as Democrats objected, a lot of them said they did so regretfully, and they might have much preferred to support a version of McCaul’s TikTok ban.
“I strongly prefer whenever you and I work together to figure something out collectively,” the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Gregory Meeks, N.Y., said to McCaul, sitting only a foot away from him.
“But I believe that this laws would damage our alliances across the globe, bring more countries into China’s influence sphere, destroy jobs here in the US, and undercut the core American values of free speech and free enterprise,” said Meeks.
Rhode Island Democratic Rep. David Cicilline said there was “broad and possibly universal support on this committee to do exactly what this bill attempts to do. Nevertheless it’s incredibly necessary that it’s done right, and that it’s done well.”
At one point, Cicilline asked McCaul to define a key term within the bill’s language that was not spelled out, and he expressed dismay that McCaul wasn’t holding hearings on the bill and consulting experts. “I’m undecided why we’re being asked to form of jam this through,” said Cicilline.
McCaul countered that Republican and Democratic staff had first met in person to debate the bill on Feb. 6, and that legislative text was given to Meeks and other Democrats greater than per week ago. If the bill seemed rushed, he said, it’s since the threat from China was so urgent.
Other Democrats warned that corporations which employ 1000’s of Americans can be swept up within the sanctions and compelled to shut down, and that there was currently no plan for what would occur to those staff.
“American corporations with no real connection to [China’s] malign influence could conceivably be banned from doing business in the US,” said freshman Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democrat who represents Los Angeles. “I’m concerned about this due to the entire entertainment corporations which can be in my district who could develop into collateral damage,” she said.
In McCaul’s view, and people of his fellow Republicans, Democrats’ fears were overblown, and whatever harm the bill might do might be outweighed by its advantages.
“This laws is step one in protecting Americans against subversive data collection,” he said.
In winning approval from this key committee, the DATA Act effectively jumped ahead of several other high-profile proposals to ban TikTok that were introduced within the House and Senate before this bill was, but which had yet to be taken up by any committee.
McCaul’s bill revises a bunch of rules referred to as the Berman amendments, which first got here into force near the tip of the Cold War. On the time, books and magazines from Cuba were being destroyed as a part of Reagan-era ban on propaganda.
The Berman amendments, named for his or her sponsor, Los Angeles-area Democratic Rep. Howard Berman, were an effort to halt the book burning by shielding creative works from executive branch sanctions.
Over time, the Berman amendments were expanded right into a broad rule that courts interpreted as prohibiting the federal government from using sanctions powers to dam the import or export of any informational materials, including digital content.
In 2020, TikTok beat back attempts by the Trump administration to dam its distribution by Apple and Google app stores by arguing successfully in court that it was covered by the Berman amendments exemption.
McCaul acknowledged that his bill was designed to provide the chief branch powers that it doesn’t have under current law.
“The courts have questioned the administration’s authority to sanction TikTok,” he said. “My bill empowers the administration to ban TikTok or every other software application that threatens U.S. national security.”
“It might be unlucky if the House Foreign Affairs Committee were to censor thousands and thousands of Americans,” TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter told CNBC in an email Monday.
TikTok isn’t any stranger to rough political waters, having been within the crosshairs of U.S. lawmakers since former President Donald Trump declared his intention to ban the app by executive motion in 2020.
On the time, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was trying to potentially spin off TikTok to maintain the app from being shut down.
In September 2020, Trump said he would approve an arrangement for TikTok to work with Oracle on a cloud deal and Walmart on a business partnership to maintain it alive.
Those deals never materialized, nevertheless, and two months later Trump was defeated by Biden within the 2020 presidential election.
The Biden administration kept up the pressure. While Biden quickly revoked the chief orders banning TikTok, he replaced them along with his own, setting out more of a road map for a way the federal government should evaluate the risks of an app connected to foreign adversaries.
TikTok has continued to have interaction with the Committee on Foreign Investment within the U.S., which is under the Treasury Department. CFIUS, which evaluates risks related to foreign investment deals, is scrutinizing ByteDance’s purchase of Musical.ly, which was announced in 2017.
The CFIUS review has reportedly stalled, but TikTok still hopes a deal might be approved.
“The swiftest and most thorough technique to address national security concerns is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we worked with them on for nearly two years,” Oberwetter told CNBC on Monday.
Within the meantime, government officials from the FBI and the Department of Justice have publicly warned concerning the dangers of using the app, and lots of states have imposed bans of their very own.
On Monday, the Biden administration released recent implementation rules for a TikTok ban that applies only to federal government-owned devices, which was passed by Congress in December.