Quick-moving House TikTok bill faces slow progress in Senate
After a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app or face a nationwide ban sailed through the House at breakneck speed this past week, its progress has slowed in the Senate.
Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader who determines what legislation gets a vote, has not decided whether to bring the bill to the floor, his spokesperson said. Senators — some of whom have their own versions of bills targeting TikTok — will need to be persuaded. Other legislation on the runway could be prioritized. And the process of taking the House bill and potentially rewriting it to suit the Senate could be time-consuming.
Many in the Senate are keeping their cards close to their vest about what they would do on the TikTok measure, even as they said they recognized the House had sent a powerful signal with its vote on the bill, which passed 352-65. The legislation mandates that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, sell its stake in the app within six months or face a ban.
“The lesson of the House vote is that this issue is capable of igniting almost spontaneously in the support that it has,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said in an interview Friday. He said that there could be adjustments made to the bill but that there was bipartisan support to wrest the app from Chinese ownership.
The slowdown in the Senate means that TikTok is likely to face weeks or even months of uncertainty about its fate in the United States. That could result in continued lobbying, alongside maneuvering by the White House, the Chinese government, and ByteDance. It is also likely to prompt potential talks about deals — whether real or imagined — while the uncertainty of losing access to the app will hang over the heads of TikTok creators and its 170 million US users.
“Almost everything will slow down in the Senate,” said Nu Wexler, a former Senate aide who worked for Google, Twitter, and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. “They’ll need some time to either massage egos or build consensus.”
The House approved the legislation just over a week after it was introduced, passing it with bipartisan support on concerns that the app could endanger American users’ data or be used as a Chinese propaganda tool. The bill also received support from the White House. After saying last week that he opposed the legislation, former president Donald Trump said he now supported it in an interview with Fox News on Friday.
The bill has angered China, with an official saying that the United States had “never found any evidence of TikTok posing a threat to US national security.” China could move to block a sale if the legislation does pass. Some lawmakers have worried that the bill could exceed Congress’ mandate by mentioning TikTok specifically, running afoul of a constitutional ban on targeting individuals in laws. And TikTok has argued that the secretive drafting of the bill and the speed at which it passed in the House suggested that lawmakers were aiming for a ban rather than a sale.
TikTok, which has repeatedly said that it has not and would not share data with the
Chinese government or allow any government to influence its algorithmic recommendations, has scrambled to respond to the bill.
Senate offices have received hundreds of phone calls and voicemail messages about the bill from TikTok users in recent days, said two Senate aides, who were not authorized to discuss the calls publicly.
NEW YORK TIMES
Pence refuses to back Trump’s bid for presidency
Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s former vice president, indicated Friday he would not be falling into line behind the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, as some of Trump’s other previous rivals including Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tim Scott did.
When asked whether he would endorse Trump now that the former president had clinched the party’s nomination, Pence said on Fox News that he “could not in good conscience” support him.
“It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year,” he told Martha MacCallum on her talk show “The Story.”
The former vice president declined to say whether he would vote for Trump in the November election, but answered, “I would never vote for Joe Biden.” He also ruled out running as a third-party or independent candidate for president, saying he remained a Republican.
NEW YORK TIMES
Calif. legislative committee focuses on happiness
SACRAMENTO — California Assemblyman Anthony Rendon likes to spend his spare time away from the Capitol in Sacramento with his 4-year-old daughter back home near Los Angeles. Last weekend, he took her ice skating and to an indoor playground, then let her get a doughnut after she agreed to ride her scooter on the way there.
“Those are the types of things that make me happy,” he said this past week in an interview outside the state Assembly chambers, where he’s served as a lawmaker for a dozen years.
Now Rendon, a Democrat who was one of the longestserving Assembly speakers in California history, is spending his last year in office trying to make happiness more central to policy making. He created a first-in-the-nation group to study the issue, called the Select Committee on Happiness and Public Policy Outcomes, which held its first public hearing this past week.
It would be “silly” for lawmakers to not study how they can make people happier, Rendon said. “Because if we have everybody clothed, everybody housed, everybody has a job and they’re miserable, then we’ve failed at what we’re trying to do,” he said, adding that lawmakers should think about happiness as a priority in policy making.
In California, three-quarters of adults say they are “very happy” or “pretty happy,” while 26 percent say they are “not too happy,” according to a September 2023 survey from the Public Policy Institute of California. Adults age 18 to 34, people who are renters, those without a post-high school degree, and Californians with an annual household income of $40,000 or lower tend to be less happy.
California is breaking new ground in the United States. At least 12 state legislatures have committees focused on mental health and substance abuse issues, but no other state legislature has a committee devoted to happiness, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
But the idea to consider happiness in public policy isn’t unprecedented: The landlocked country of Bhutan in South Asia prioritizes happiness as a goal of public policy, measuring it through something written into its constitution called the Gross National Happiness Index. The country surveys residents on their level of happiness, and officials work to increase happiness by providing residents with free health care and education, protecting cultural traditions, and preserving forests, said Phuntsho Norbu, consul general of the Kingdom of Bhutan to the United States.
The government cannot make every person happy, but it should “create the right conditions that will allow people to pursue happiness,” Nrbu said.
ASSOCIATED PRESS