President-elect Donald Trump has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay, until after his January 20 inauguration, Congress’s ban on Chinese-owned social media company TikTok from access to the US. The ban will be removed if it is sold to an non-Chinese buyer approved by the President by or before January 19. Congress banned the platform from US access based on concerns that the Chinese government could gather intelligence and sensitive personal data from the platform, and use TikTok to spread misinformation to its 170 million users in the U.S.
Trump asked the Supreme Court to hit the pause button because, he argues, the ban prohibits free speech by its American users, Trump wants time as President to negotiate because, as his legal brief claims, “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the governments national security concerns.”
That’ a lot of BS! Trump is addicted to disinformation and spreads lots of it through TikTok. It’s been the most important source of his power over voters. So he’ll do anything to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. Nevertheless, even as President, he’d need legislation from Congress to repeal the ban, and 90% of the House Republicans voted in support of the ban unless it divests itself from its Chinese ownership, and Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, urged the Supreme Court to reject TikTok’s bid to pause the ban.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on January 10, 2025. The quick scheduling conjures memories of how the Court took just one day is make Republican candidate Gore President, It took Trump’s defense team just 21 days to get a judge to hear its motion to disqualify Fani Willis from prosecuting Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In contrast, the Court’s majority delayed Trump’s immunity case until after Trump was elected, making the outcome moot.
The Court started 2024 by shamefully perverting the Constitution to keep Trump on the Colorado presidential ballot. It erroneously held that only Congress, and not the states, may bar a candidate from running under the disqualifications listed in Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which disqualifies anyone who’s engaged in insurrection. The holding degraded disqualification under Section 3 to a political decision. Now, any insurrectionist whose party can raise a majority vote in Congress can be President.
The more rational holding would have been to affirm the two decisions by Colorado courts that Trump is an insurrectionist and thus ineligible to be President. The justices noted but didn’t disagree with the two Colorado courts’ factual findings that Trump had “engaged in insurrection.” Indeed, the Court ignored its own holding that a state court’s factual findings must be accepted by federal courts unless they’re clearly erroneous. No factual error was found. Yet the Court chose to let a judicially determined insurrectionist run for President in order to leave the door
