McConnell Presses SCOTUS To Reject TikTok’s Request For Delay In Case

McConnell Presses SCOTUS To Reject TikTok’s Request For Delay In Case

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, urging the justices to reject TikTok’s attempt to delay the implementation of a law that could result in the app being banned as early as next month.

The Supreme Court announced it would hear arguments on whether the law infringes on First Amendment rights, although it has not yet ruled on TikTok’s request to temporarily block the legislation. With oral arguments scheduled for January 10, the Court could issue a decision before the ban’s planned enforcement date of January 19.

McConnell, who was instrumental in passing the law as part of a foreign aid package earlier this year, argued in the brief that TikTok’s claims of First Amendment violations were baseless.

“The topsy-turvy idea that TikTok has an expressive right to facilitate the CCP censorship regime is absurd,” McConnell’s counsel, Michael A. Fragoso, wrote. “Would Congress have needed to allow [late Soviet Premier] Nikita Khrushchev to buy CBS and replace The Bing Crosby Show with Alexander Nevsky?” Fragoso added, “The goal of this litigation is delay.”

The legislation requires ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest its ownership of the app or face a ban across U.S. networks and app stores.

President-elect Donald Trump has signaled support for TikTok, pledging during his campaign to “save” the app, though he has not outlined specific plans since the election, according to The Hill.

McConnell’s legal team stated that the Senate minority leader expects the incoming administration to enforce the law “if called upon to do so.” However, Fragoso acknowledged that this leaves a small chance for TikTok to avoid the ban, referring to it as “a glimmer of hope that their corporate death penalty will be stayed.”

Earlier this month, a federal appeals court upheld the law, ruling that it does not violate the First Amendment. In response, TikTok filed its petition with the Supreme Court on Monday.

Simultaneously, McConnell has been challenging the president-elect’s foreign policy stance. In an essay for Foreign Affairs published Monday, McConnell urged Trump to reject what he referred to as America First’s “flirtation with isolation and decline.”

The Senate minority leader encouraged the incoming administration to embrace foreign policy measures Trump opposed during the campaign, such as expanded foreign aid, free trade agreements, strengthening NATO alliances, and increasing military support for Ukraine.

“The [Trump] administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy,” McConnell wrote in the essay. “It must reject them. To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs. America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”

He added, “The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation.”

McConnell’s advocacy for an interventionist foreign policy, reminiscent of the George W. Bush administration, and a larger defense budget to address multiple global threats contrasts with Trump’s campaign rhetoric. His stance raises questions about how far McConnell may go in opposing the president-elect’s policies and nominees.

In an interview with the Financial Times last week, McConnell remarked, “We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War Two. Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”

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