WASHINGTON — The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs voted Wednesday to pass a bill that might give President Joe Biden the facility to ban TikTok, a Chinese social media app utilized by greater than 100 million Americans.
The bill passed the Republican-controlled committee 24-16 along party lines, with unanimous GOP support and no Democratic votes.
Now that the committee has passed through committee, the following steps shall be determined by the House Republican leadership, which controls which bills shall be voted on in the House. China policy is an important national security issue for the Republican House of Representatives.
On Wednesday, it was unclear what the timeline for any TikTok ban could be, and House spokesman Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., didn’t reply to CNBC’s questions.
The Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries Act, or DATA, would invalidate long-standing protections which have protected creative content, corresponding to short videos on TikTok, from US sanctions for many years.
Because it stands, it could also go further by ordering the president to impose broad sanctions against Chinese-based or Chinese-controlled firms that engage in transferring Americans’ “sensitive personal information” to Chinese-based or controlled entities or individuals.
And while the bill would allow the president to acquire exemptions from national security duty in certain cases, it is basically based on a mandate.
In greater than 4 hours of Tuesday’s debate over 11 different China-related bills, Democrats and Republicans agreed on almost each one of them. But as for the DATA bill, Democrats strongly opposed it, saying it contained an excessive amount of language and accusing Republicans of attempting to “block” it.
Data Act was first introduced to Congress last Friday. At Tuesday’s committee meeting, the bill had just one sponsor, the newly sitting Republican panel chairman, Texas Representative Mike McCaul.
Typically, such a latest bill with just one sponsor wouldn’t go to a committee vote just a couple of days after it was introduced. However the alternative of which bills are voted down by the committee is made by the chair of each committee, so McCaul’s sponsorship was effectively all of the bill needed.
Nevertheless, at the same time as Democrats objected, many said they regretted doing so and would have preferred to support McCaul’s version of banning TikTok.
“I much prefer you and I working together to give you something together,” said the panel’s leading Democrat, Congressman Gregory Meeks of New York, to McCaul, sitting only a foot away from him.
“But I feel this bill would hurt our alliances around the globe, bring more countries into China’s sphere of influence, destroy jobs in the US, and undermine the core American values of free speech and free enterprise,” Meeks said.
Rhode Island Democratic Representative David Cicilline said there was “broad and maybe universal support in that committee for doing exactly what this bill is attempting to do. But it surely’s extremely essential that it’s done well and well.”
At one point, Cicilline asked McCaul to define a key term in the language of the bill that was not specified, and expressed dismay that McCaul was not holding hearings on the bill and consulting experts. “I’m unsure why we were asked to sort of block it,” Cicilline said.
McCaul countered that Republican and Democratic employees first met in person to debate the bill on February 6, and the legislative text was handed over to Meeks and other Democrats greater than per week ago. If the bill seemed rushed, he said, it was since the threat from China was so urgent.
Other Democrats have warned that firms employing hundreds of Americans shall be sanctioned and compelled to shut, and there may be currently no plan for what’s going to occur to those employees.
“American firms with no real connection to [China’s] malevolent influences might be banned in the US,” said freshman Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democrat representing Los Angeles. who can grow to be a collateral victim,” she said.
In accordance with McCaul and his fellow Republicans, the Democrats’ fears were exaggerated, and any damage the bill could do could be outweighed by its advantages.
“This bill is step one in protecting Americans from subversive data collection,” he said.
By winning the approval of this key committee, the DATA Act effectively moved ahead several others loud suggestions ban TikToks that were introduced in the House and Senate prior to the passage of this bill, but which haven’t yet been taken up by any committee.
McCaul’s draft amends a gaggle of laws called the Berman Amendments, which first got here into force at the top of the Cold War. On the time, books and magazines from Cuba were being destroyed as part of the Reagan-era propaganda ban.
The Berman Amendments, named after their sponsor, Los Angeles Area Democratic Representative Howard Berman, attempted to stop book burnings by protecting creative works from executive sanctions.
With time, Berman’s corrections have been prolonged right into a broad rule that the courts have interpreted as prohibiting the federal government from using sanctioning powers to dam the import or export of any information material, including digital content.
In 2020 TikTok resist trials by the Trump administration to dam its distribution on the Apple and Google app stores, successfully arguing in court that it falls under the exemption from Berman’s amendments.
McCaul acknowledged that his bill was intended to offer the chief branch powers it doesn’t have under existing law.
“The courts have challenged the administration’s authority to sanction TikTok,” he said. “My bill authorizes the administration to ban TikTok or some other app that threatens US national security.”
“It will be unlucky if the House Foreign Affairs Committee censored tens of millions of Americans,” TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter told CNBC in an email on Monday.
TikTok isn’t any stranger to choppy political waters, having been in the crosshairs of US lawmakers since former President Donald Trump announced his intention to ban the app through executive motion in 2020.
On the time, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, potentially desired to spin off TikTok to stop the app from shutting down.
In September 2020, Trump said he would approve a TikTok collaboration agreement with Oracle for a cloud deal and Walmart for a business partnership to maintain it alive.
These deals, nevertheless, never materialized, and two months later, Trump was defeated by Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
The Biden administration kept the pressure on. While Biden quickly repealed the chief orders banning TikTok, he replaced them together with his own, outlining more of a road map for the way the federal government should assess the risks of an app connected to foreign adversaries.
TikTok continues to work with the US Foreign Investment Committee, which reports to the Treasury Department. CFIUS, which assesses the risks related to foreign investment transactions, is looking into the acquisition of ByteDance musical.lywhich was announced in 2017.
The CFIUS review has reportedly stalled, but TikTok continues to be hoping the deal shall be approved.
“The quickest and most thorough approach to address national security concerns is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement, which we have been working with them for nearly two years,” Oberwetter told CNBC on Monday.
Meanwhile, government officials from the FBI and Justice Department have publicly warned of the risks of using the app, and plenty of states have enacted their very own bans.
On Monday, the Biden administration fired latest implementation rules for a TikTok ban that only applies to devices owned by the federal government, which was passed by Congress in December.