Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court on Wednesday, urging the justices to deny TikTok’s request to delay a law that could lead to the app’s ban next month.
The court announced Wednesday that it will hear arguments on whether the law violates the First Amendment without explicitly accepting or rejecting TikTok’s request to temporarily block the law.
However, the case’s expedited timeline, with oral arguments scheduled for Jan. 10, provides the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule before the ban is set to take effect on Jan. 19.
When he was still the top Republican in the Senate, the Kentucky senator spearheaded efforts to pass a foreign aid package in April that included the law. The law mandates that TikTok’s China-based parent company, ByteDance, must divest from the app or face a ban on U.S. networks and app stores.
In Wednesday’s filing, McConnell dismissed TikTok’s argument that the law violates the First Amendment.
“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.”
President-elect Trump has expressed support for TikTok, vowing to “save” the app during his campaign, although he has not provided specific details about his plans since the election, The Hill reported.
McConnell’s lawyer stated that the Senate minority leader expects the incoming administration to enforce the law “if called upon to do so.”
But, he noted, “This offers petitioners a glimmer of hope that their corporate death penalty will be stayed.”
TikTok turned to the Supreme Court on Monday after a federal appeals court upheld the law earlier this month, ruling that it did not violate the First Amendment.
Meanwhile, McConnell is challenging the president-elect’s foreign policy outlook, urging the president-elect to reject what he describes as America First’s “flirtation with isolation and decline” in an essay published in Foreign Affairs on Monday.
The former Senate Republican leader is also encouraging the administration to adopt many foreign policy positions that Trump notably opposed during the campaign, including supporting increased foreign aid, free trade agreements, solidarity with NATO, and more weapons transfers to Ukraine.
The United States urgently needs to reach a bipartisan consensus on the centrality of hard power to U.S. foreign policy. Read my full essay in @ForeignAffairs: https://t.co/Z463yFxxPk
— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) December 16, 2024
“The [Trump] administration will face calls from within the Republican Party to give up on American primacy,” McConnell wrote in Foreign Affairs. “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.”
“The response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation,” McConnell wrote.
McConnell’s remarks, which advocate for an interventionist foreign policy similar to the George W. Bush administration and a larger defense budget to deter multiple adversaries, raise questions about how far the Kentucky Republican is willing to go in opposing the president-elect’s nominees and agenda.
“We’re in a very, very dangerous world right now, reminiscent of before World War Two,” McConnell told the Financial Times in an interview published last week. “Even the slogan is the same. ‘America First.’ That was what they said in the ’30s.”
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