TikTok moved closer to its doomsday recently after the U.S House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill to force its sale or ban it. President Joe Biden said he will sign the bill if it hits his desk. Do not count on it happening.

Even though the bill soared through the House with a stunning amount of support, 352-65, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he is unsure he will even bring the bill to the floor for a vote. It may not even fall on him. The Senate Commerce Committee who will want to make changes to the bill. Though, it is likely they will try to sit on it.

Do not take my word for it, though. Take committee chairperson Sen. Maria Cantwell’s. “Following today’s House vote, I will be talking to my Senate and House colleagues to try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties,” the Washington-based Democrat, Cantwell said.

The bill violates neither, but that is not the point. If the bill languishes in the committee, the political cost to move it will rise. It is one thing to vote to ban a popular social media app with hundreds of others. It is a much harder challenge to urge a committee to move a stalled bill as one voice.

This may be the point. While a TikTok forced sale or ban has strong bipartisan support, Democrats in the upper house appear to be playing defense. They likely know that Biden is losing support with the young voters who are sweet on the app, and that banning it in an election year is bad politics. America’s political attention span is short, and a sundry of funding battles and potential government shutdowns are sure to dominate headlines alongside the election and Donald Trump’s legal troubles.

But Schumer and Cantwell are playing a cynical game. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is legally bound to the ruling Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, as are all other businesses in the country. And the national security risk is real. It is telling that the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted unanimously to move the bill forward to a full House vote after sitting through a classified briefing about the app’s security concerns.

Add this to the facts that the app has already been banned from government-owned devices and that ByteDance employees have been previously accused of spying on journalists to help the CCP find internal leakers, and you can see the problem. This is to say nothing of the lengths the CCP will go through to censor videos about Uyghur forced labor camps or the Tiananmen Square massacre. This is in stark contrast to the political content that typically trends in the United States.

TikTok only buttressed these concerns by sending notifications to its 170 million U.S. users, urging them to call their local representatives ahead of the House vote. The deluge of calls would overwhelm congressional phone lines. Not a good look when you are in the company of a foreign adversary and are being accused of spying and political manipulation.

Specious legal claims are sure to fly even if the bill passes the Senate and heads to the president’s desk. Most of them will be bunk, but that has never stopped them from being used to strike down previous attempts to ban the app, as was the case with former President Trump’s executive order to force ByteDance to sell TikTok in 2020.

For example, some opponents of the bill say that banning TikTok runs afoul of the First Amendment. These claims do not carry water, though. One version of this argument says that TikTok is like a newspaper, and that the government does not possess the power to stop a broadsheet from going to print. True, government does not possess that power in most cases. But, the debate between whether social media apps qualify as publishers with First Amendment protections or if they are considered common carriers like a telecom company, who do not, has been adjudicated without conclusion for years. And it should be noted that Chinese telecom companies have been banned before in the U.S.

Another version of the speech argument claims that a TikTok ban would violate the rights of the app’s users and content creators. How? That remains vague and unanswered. The moving of users from TikTok to Meta or YouTube, who have often run the same short videos, hardly seems a violation. Especially since ByteDance is not American owned. If the CCP wanted to start a state-owned newspaper in the Pennsylvania suburbs, its readers would not be able to say they lost their free speech rights because they could no longer write letters to the editor if it got shut down.

The longer the bill remains dormant, the more likely it will die in the Senate. House Republicans bucked Trump after he flip-flopped and came out against the bill, but who is to say how long they will hold the line? Some reports say that Trump is trying to sway Republicans to vote no on the bill because of GOP mega-donor Jeffrey Yass being an investor. Trump says he is against the bill because it will empower Facebook and Instagram owner Meta. The latter point will be the rub, as a delay in the bill’s passage will allow Trump to foment the ire that Republicans have toward social media censorship.

This is a shame because the House got it right. One benefit a constitutional republic has over a pure democracy is a political class that can rise above populist sentiments to make the hard choices for the greater good. It is a pity that the Senate is willing to abdicate its duty to act cool in front of the kids. 

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