White House: ‘Americans Shouldn’t Expect to See TikTok Suddenly Banned on Sunday’
According to a report from NBC News, the Biden administration is considering ways to keep TikTok available in the United States even after it is scheduled to be banned on Sunday.
Barring intervention from the Supreme Court, which heard arguments from both sides of the aisle last week, TikTok is set to be banned in the US on Sunday. Parent company Bytedance is prepared to comply with the law and is said to be ready to cease operations on January 19. However, according to a White House administrator, President Biden’s outgoing administration is looking for ways to keep it online.
“Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” an administration official tells NBC.
Even though the law passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by Biden, it appears that the president doesn’t want the final day of his presidency defined by the TikTok situation and wants to pass that on to the incoming Donald Trump.
Mike Waltz, the incoming national security adviser for Trump, already said that the president-elect is “ready to intervene” in the process and “save” TikTok in some way, although the details of how he might do that are foggy. Trump has hinted that he may attempt to postpone TikTok’s banning via executive order, however during his presidency he attempted to ban the app via the same method, which was overturned by the courts for being outside of the power of such an act.
During the Supreme Court hearing, the Court asked if it were possible for Donald Trump could simply refuse to enforce the ban after becoming president. US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said that yes, that was possible and up to his discretion. However, it seems that Biden’s administration disagrees.
“We are not considering deferring enforcement,” the White House official says to NBC. “Statutorily, we don’t believe we have the authority to do that.”
Neither Biden’s administration nor the incoming Trump administration has been particularly detailed on how each intends to deal with this hot-button topic, although it is believed that Trump’s team will try and defer the ban in some way, buying time to negotiate the sale of the app. Chinese officials are apparently mulling the possibility of selling the app to Elon Musk.
At the time of publication, the Supreme Court had not issued its decision on the fate of TikTok, however it seems likely that it will uphold the decisions from the lower courts and find the ban law legal.
Image credits: Elements of header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
