Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/25/judge-to-decide-by-sunday-if-tiktok-will-remain-in-u-s-app-stores.html
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I could see this coming to haunt the GOP. The next generation of voters already skews left.
On what grounds is the Justice Department arguing that such a ban is necessary? People keep talking about this ban like it’s something that’s going to happen, but I really don’t see the legal grounds behind the executive order. Is there any reason why a judge would decide to uphold the ban?
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That’s plenty of time for them to dismantle the whole system before it becomes an issue. By next month we’ll have a Supreme Court that would happily agree that the Constitution really only intended for white land-owning men over 30 to have a vote.
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They don’t need to. The EO is in place. It’s Tiktok who have to argue that it should be set aside. The Justice Department’s role in this would ‘just’ be to argue against Tiktok’s application. At a guess that would mostly be on the grounds that the court lacks jurisdiction and/or that it is not the court’s role to determine whether Tiktok is a threat or not. That decision is for the President and he has made it.
My understanding is that the only legal ground needed for the order is the President deciding to make one. The legal power to do that is granted by the legislation cited in the EO.
The only real grounds to overturn the ban might be if the grounds given in the order are patently false and the real grounds are unconstitutional - such as for example a travel ban which claims not to be aimed at a religious group even though the President is on record saying ‘I’m going to ban Muslims, here is my travel ban aimed at Muslims.’
In that case of course there was considerable disagreement about whether one could in fact look beyond the stated aims of the EO and if one could, whether it would make any difference.
The conservative majority on the SC said they would assume that they could (note that’s not a decisive ruling on that point and they made the same assumption but not ruling about whether the court had jurisdiction) but decided that the public statements weren’t enough to say that the order wasn’t in fact ‘plausibly’ aimed at what it claimed to be aimed at.
Now if those statements weren’t enough, it’s hard to see what could be.
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So the underlying legislation gives the president carte blanche power to effectively ban any corporation from operating in the US without having to give any reason beyond an undefined “national security threat?” The government is under no obligation whatsoever to show how the corporation is a national security threat? The burden is actually on the corporation to show that it is not a national security threat? That’s pretty messed up… And why hasn’t he done this with Volkswagen or Nestle or some other company from a country he doesn’t like?
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I know that was sarcasm, but please stop making such statements as if these events have already happened and the outcome is written in stone.
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