Expectations for the 118th House of Representatives were the opposite of great. Given the fever pitch of partisan rancor and divided control of the House and Senate, the most anyone dared hope for was that Congress could find a way to keep the lights on. Notwithstanding two bruising speakership battles and a historic lack of GOP agenda discipline in the House, our legislators cleared that bar. Bipartisan majorities coalesced to support must-pass legislation. For all the talk of Republicans being allergic to governance, no debt default or government shutdown occurred.
Not that the legislative highlight reel was one for the ages. Lawmakers snuck through a few low-salience beauties, like the nuclear-energy-promoting ADVANCE Act. They got through a reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration. Top leaders brokered a supplemental spending deal to send $61 billion in aid to Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.
But the biggest surprise was that the supplemental also contained the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—the TikTok divestment law. This was not a must-pass measure, nor was it engineered by top partisan leaders. Instead, it is the rare case in which lawmakers ran toward a difficult issue and shouldered responsibility, even knowing that they would face a well-orchestrated backlash. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals hears oral arguments in TikTok’s legal challenge to the law on September 16, but any final legal resolution will take some time. So it’s worth asking: How did Congress move the ball forward on an issue of genuine consequence—and is there a way to replicate the success?
TikTok’s rise has been meteoric. The company, founded in late 2017, now claims some 170 million U.S. users. Originally known for dancing and lip-syncing videos, the platform appeals to users who skew younger than X (Twitter), Facebook, or Instagram. Perhaps for this reason, it remains somewhat less political than X, but about half of its users say that they get political content on the app. Any product with this kind of social penetration is bound to cause backlash for its successes as much as for its shortcomings.
But TikTok has become a target for American politicians because of its connections to China and the Chinese Communist Party. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of ByteDance, a private company headquartered in Beijing. The CCP controls a board seat of Douyin, another Bytedance subsidiary that operates exclusively in China. Though TikTok boasts support from some U.S. investors and claims to be insulated from CCP influence, the American national security community maintains that the CCP can effectively control what content the app delivers.
Algorithms manipulating our attention for profit raise important concerns. Algorithms manipulating our—and our children’s—attention on behalf of our most significant geopolitical foe sounds positively nightmarish. The app seems even more menacing when we add concerns about its ability to collect and transmit to the CCP data on each of its users’ movements and behavior. Complacency would be reckless, and even watchful waiting seems naïve, given the difficulty of detecting malign influence or data operations in real time.
The executive branch reacted to TikTok’s growing threat with a flurry of actions, but none stuck. Donald Trump’s administration opened various reviews of the firm and, in August 2020, invoked emergency authorities to issue an outright ban. That action was blocked in court before it took effect and remained in legal limbo by the time of Joe Biden’s inauguration. In June 2021, Biden revoked the ban but renewed scrutiny of TikTok and other China-connected apps by ordering further reviews. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States continued its review, begun during the Trump administration, and seemed close to a deal with TikTok in 2022 aimed at permitting the platform to keep operating here, while preventing the Chinese government from accessing its user data —but because of concerns raised by the Department of Justice and FBI, it was never concluded.
Meantime, Congress ginned up its typical mix of outrage and posturing, which most observers thought would end in its typical failure to act. The 117th Congress saw the Block the Tok Act and the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act), among others. But legislators did not stop at mere position-taking. In the lame duck session, the Senate took up Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) bill to ban TikTok from government devices and passed it unanimously. The provision was then incorporated into the year-end omnibus spending bill, leading the federal government to join more than a dozen states that had already taken similar steps. (Today, the number stands at 39.)
Naturally, TikTok protested this action, saying that legislators had given themselves over to irrational fears and ignored the company’s good-faith efforts to protect American user data. But a government-device ban would have minimal impact on the platform’s huge and still fast-growing U.S. business. The company apparently believed that, some saber-rattling aside, a frontal assault was unlikely to follow.
Initially, House shenanigans seemed to vindicate any such complacency. The new lower chamber did not seem likely to be a world-beater. Republicans took 15 ballots to elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House in January 2023, which left the majority party with numerous internal feuds. Relations between the parties were also poor, with GOP targeting of Hunter Biden and lawsuits proceeding against Trump poisoning attempts at bipartisanship.
China policy proved an exception, however. Nearly every kind of member except left-wing progressives was in a hawkish mood, creating room for strange bedfellows. Consider the pair of Representatives Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), House sponsors of the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act and now appointed as chair and ranking member of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. Before the 2022 midterm, House Republicans had promised to create a vehicle devoted to this issue, and they managed to bring most Democrats along in voting the panel into existence.
The Select Committee, consisting of 13 Republicans and 11 Democrats, was given no legislative remit. To be effective, the committee’s leaders understood they would have to build a broad coalition for action that would then cooperate with the standing committees able to move bills toward passage. For TikTok, it brought together national security advocates, think thanks, human rights groups, and concerned parents, creating a united front for action.
The Select Committee found an eager partner in the Energy and Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). In March 2023, her committee grilled TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, for more than five hours. The through-line was clear: lawmakers believed TikTok’s data-security strategies were incapable of addressing their root concern, which was that neither CCP manipulation of TikTok’s algorithm nor covert inspection of user data could be ruled out as long as TikTok remains entangled with ByteDance.
Chew, a Singaporean national, was flustered by what he saw as committee members’ insistence that his company achieve a level of data security that no other social network could match. Still, he may have believed that Congress had taken its best shot. The most prominent piece of legislation targeting TikTok, Sen. Mark Warner’s (D-VA) RESTRICT Act, earned a White House endorsement but got no traction in the Senate Commerce Committee. TikTok got the support of many of the House’s most prominent progressives, including Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), who argued that anti-Chinese racial animus was critics’ real motivation. On Super Bowl Sunday this past February, Biden’s campaign opened an account and posted a video of the president opining about the contest—accompanied by the message, “lol hey guys.” It seemed as though the sheer draw of the user base might counterbalance China hawks’ suspicions; as the Wall Street Journal has reported, TikTok’s lobbyists apparently thought they were in the clear.
Instead, they were subjected to one of the most impressive legislative blitzes in recent memory—and their attempt to scramble in response went badly awry. Members of the Select Committee and Energy & Commerce Committee had been quietly drafting legislation, which they introduced on March 5. The bill, sponsored by Gallagher and co-sponsored by Krishnamoorthi and 18 other members, was quite different in substance from earlier efforts, avoiding any attempt to penalize TikTok users and instead targeting only its major disseminators (e.g., Apple and Google’s app stores). The bill was framed as a divestment measure, rather than a ban.
Representative McMorris Rodgers wanted to move the bill very quickly, before TikTok could mobilize a massive lobbying campaign. But TikTok responded almost instantly, sending out push notifications to its tens of millions of mobile users asking them to call their representatives and stop the ban. Users obliged in huge numbers, deluging House offices with calls.
Members were not persuaded or amused. Instead, convinced that the stunt demonstrated how TikTok could hijack American political institutions, their resolve only hardened. The relevant subcommittee discharged the bill to the full committee the day after it was introduced, and the next day the full committee passed it, without amendment, by an unheard-of vote of 50–0.
Less than a week later, a classified national security briefing was offered for all House members. We cannot know how damning the evidence presented was, but the session’s effectiveness apparently went beyond whatever intelligence was shared. Away from the glare of cameras, the bill’s supporters had a chance to persuade their colleagues of the bill’s importance and fundamental reasonableness. Less than a week after it was introduced, the full House suspended the rules (a common procedure for accelerated consideration of a bill with strong support) and passed the bill 352-65 (with mostly progressives in opposition).
That was hardly a guarantee that the bill would ever become law. The more skeptical Senate seemed likely to avoid a tricky and sensitive issue simply by refusing to act on the bill. But the bill’s sponsors had been in close contact with the office of Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA), which shared the Select Committee’s hawkishness toward the CCP and was eager for a victory on that front in an otherwise frustrating congressional session. Once the bill had gotten such broad support in the House, Scalise and Speaker Mike Johnson (also R-LA) worked with its sponsors to devise an effective way of forcing the decision on the Senate: they would package it in an omnibus supplemental spending bill along with foreign aid for Ukraine, a major Democratic priority. Cleverly, a Rules Committee maneuver allowed House members to vote on each of four component parts separately and then packaged them as a single law to send on to the Senate. Altogether, leadership performed shrewdly in coordinating across the many interested committees: the Select Committee, E&C, appropriators, defense, foreign affairs, and intelligence—not to mention the White House, which was kept in the loop throughout.
Before the TikTok bill climbed into this omnibus, its House champions made one important alteration: they changed its deadline from six months to nine months, adding the possibility of a three-month extension if a deal is in progress. This brought Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), chairwoman of the Senate’s commerce committee, into reluctant acquiescence. It then became a good bet that the full Senate would simply swallow the House’s cooking, a major reversal of the predominant dynamic in recent years. It did just that on April 23, just seven weeks after the bill was first introduced in the House. Because of the deadline change, TikTok’s American operations would be sure to continue past the 2024 election—which came as a relief to those members (mostly Democrats) heavily invested in using the platform.
Two sorts of uncertainty now hang over the law, one legal and one political. First, courts tend to defer to Congress on matters of national security and have specifically allowed restrictions on foreign ownership of U.S. media channels in the past. Still, TikTok is mounting a vigorous legal challenge to the law, mainly on First Amendment grounds. The company says that divestment is impossible, and that the law is thus a heavy-handed ban on speech hastily enacted by fevered legislators.
Second, politically, TikTok has found a powerful ally in Donald Trump. Though Trump’s administration went after TikTok with zeal, the former president has lately come to the opinion that killing TikTok would be too much of a boon to his nemeses at Meta. He has also become close with Jeff Yass, a major investor in the company. If he is reelected, it’s anyone’s guess whether he would attempt to reverse the law or work against it in court. Regardless of who is in the White House, if TikTok fails to find a way to disentangle itself from Bytedance, then it will surely mount a last-ditch PR campaign to rouse users whose accounts will soon lose their value.
What is the procedural moral to this story, apart from the geopolitical implications of TikTok’s Chinese connections? Few issues have alarmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as much as China’s emphasis on information warfare, so some of the dynamics at play are unlikely to be replicable. Still, it is worth emphasizing what a constructive role the Select Committee on the CCP was able to play. Its members created room for private and public deliberation that was something more than a rehearsal of grievances.
By creating a bipartisan committee focusing on staff work, the House prioritized relationship and coalition-building. By putting to work a committee with no jurisdiction of its own, the House invested in shaping the political narrative around China, not only for public consumption but also to persuade members themselves. The TikTok bill was not the only dividend; after Gallagher’s retirement from Congress, the committee has continued under the leadership of Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI). It has done work on the shamefully neglected topic of biosecurity, with hopes for a attaching a bill on that subject to this year’s spending package. Republicans hope to renew the committee in 2025. Creating select committees to push along legislators’ thinking is likely to be helpful on high-importance issues where partisan enmities have not yet set in but intelligent policy solutions exist: artificial intelligence comes to mind.
Leadership’s role in the TikTok saga is also a model worthy of emulation in other areas. From the outset of the Congress, key players in the majority leader’s and Speaker’s offices were constructive players. They ultimately played a decisive role in getting the bill across the finish line without ever hijacking its substance. By playing a behind-the-scenes orchestrating role, leadership empowered members to legislate on behalf of the American people. Many critics believed that this was too much to ask from the House. But Congress, at its best, is full of surprises.
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