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WASHINGTON — The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to take up legislation Tuesday that would give President Joe Biden the authority to ban TikTok, the Chinese social media app used by more than 100 million Americans.
The panel is scheduled to vote on a series of China-related bills Tuesday afternoon, including one that would revise the longstanding protections that have shielded distributors of foreign creative content like TikTok from U.S. sanctions for decades. Introduced last Friday, H.R. 1153 is expected to pass the committee on Tuesday.
The bill that could ultimately ensnare TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, only has one sponsor, the committee’s newly seated Republican chairman, Texas Rep. Mike McCaul.
Typically, a bill this new, with only one sponsor, would not move to committee votes just days after it was introduced. But the choice of which bills will advance through a committee is made by each committee’s chairman, so McCaul’s sponsorship is effectively all the bill needs.
If the measure is approved by a majority of the committee members and referred to the full House for a vote, as expected, H.R. 1153 will effectively leap frog several other proposals to ban TikTok that were previously introduced in the House and Senate, but haven’t yet advanced through the committee process.
After that, McCaul’s bill would likely pass the Republican-controlled House easily. But its fate in the Democratic majority Senate is unclear.
Despite the bitter divisions between the two parties on nearly every major issue, there is one thing both Democrats and Republicans overwhelmingly support: proactive measures to stem China’s growing global influence. And H.R. 1153 could do that.
In practical terms, the bill would revise a group of rules known as the Berman amendments that were first enacted near the end of the Cold War, intended to shield “informational materials” like books and magazines from sanctions-related…
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