TikTok Could Be The Test For China Select Committee
TikTok Could Be The Test For China Select Committee
How do you find a metric of bipartisan success?
Last night was the primetime launch of the new House China Select Committee — you can watch the whole hearing here.
I wrote on the Committee at The Spectator:
As hearings go, this one was decidedly short on partisan acrimony. The only outbursts in the room came from a couple of Code Pink protesters, who have rather amazingly not gone the way of the dodo in the years since the Iraq War. Time and again, the issue of TikTok was raised as an example of China’s ability to manipulate information for millions of Americans, driving the news cycle and fomenting division.
The committee’s launch is a meaningful symbol. But the real test will be where it goes from here. Will it ensure greater awareness among the political class regarding China’s troublesome activity? Will there be actual ramifications of its existence?
On a basic level, the binary may turn out to be the continued existence of TikTok as a Chinese-owned asset in the United States. Forcing its sale, something which previously fell through, or banning it entirely would seem to deliver a direct message about the risks of putting China’s influence into the pockets of millions of Americans.
Yet on the morning after the committee’s first hearing, another congressional committee showed how that bipartisanship can break down. The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced Chairman Michael McCaul’s DATA Act, which would give the president the authority to ban foreign-owned applications in the US, as well as imposing sanctions on TikTok and other Chinese applications. Yet it passed only on a party line vote, with all Democrats opposed. While it’s far from the only piece of anti-TikTok legislation, the split was a surprising one given the context of the moment.
Ranking Member Gregory Meeks, a Democrat, explained the partisan opposition by claiming that TikTok is a beautiful mystery, a series of tubes, if you will, and that a rush to ban it for nefarious activity on behalf of the CCP is comparable to the WMD fearmongering that led to the Iraq War:
“We cannot act rashly without consideration of the very real soft power, free speech and economic consequences of a ban,” Meeks said on Tuesday. He later warned his colleagues against using the tactics of “fear” to pass a TikTok ban. “I’ve seen that tactic utilized before — fear that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, without evidence or proof,” he said.
Bipartisanship is all fine and good in the vacuous context of the Sunday shows and op-ed pages. But when it comes to the process of actually legislating, we have no real measure of how deep this new bipartisan reality on China really goes. And if it turns out to be just one more issue where nothing ever gets done, expect it to become a major hot-button issue in 2024 — both as a matter of difference between the Joe Biden White House and his Republican opponent, and as an item of concern that the Chinese Communist Party intends use TikTok to direct the narrative of the political cycle.
Here’s H.R. McMaster on the choice facing the country. And here’s more on the domestic side of the Committee’s work from Adam White.
So Long, Lori Lightfoot
The first Chicago mayor to lose re-election in 40 years didn’t even make it to the runoff. WSJ report on why she lost:
Ms. Lightfoot angered the union and many parents of school children at the start of her tenure. A teachers strike in 2019, as the new mayor wrestled with a gaping budget hole, was marked by barbs from both sides. The union accused Ms. Lightfoot of failing to follow through on campaign promises, while the mayor said the union kept moving the goal posts for a deal.
An agreement hit a snag when the mayor pushed back against a union demand that all 11 days missed during the strike be made up at the end of the year. Union President Jesse Sharkey said the mayor was punishing teachers and students. The strike was settled in October 2019 after a compromise on makeup days.
Lengthy disputes over return-to-school plans during the Covid pandemic created fresh tension in early 2021. Ms. Lightfoot and the head of the school district threatened to lock some educators out of online teaching software if they didn’t report to school.
“We’re deeply disappointed that the mayor has chosen to stop negotiating and instead move to lock out educators and shut down schools rather than work out our differences,” Mr. Sharkey said at the time.
The union begrudgingly ratified an agreement in February 2021 to reopen elementary schools for in-person learning, but said it wasn’t happy with the agreement or the administration of Ms. Lightfoot.
Ms. Lightfoot had a rocky relationship with city council, and by the time she began to campaign for re-election, several former allies had left her camp and endorsed other candidates.
“I think there is a lot of disappointment in the communities that I represent, about having high hopes for her and being very disappointed in her performance,” said city-council member Tom Tunney, a pro-business restaurant owner in the city’s liberal Lakeview neighborhood. Mr. Tunney, who is retiring from the council at the end of his term and had considered his own mayoral bid, endorsed Mr. Vallas.
Ms. Lightfoot also sparred with the police union over overtime scheduling and the city vaccination policy.
When crime rose in Chicago during the pandemic, as it did in many major cities, she struggled to respond in a way that reassured voters. The number of murders in the city last year was down from 2021, when it was the highest in more than 20 years, but some crimes including car theft continued to rise.
More from Charles Lipson:
Together, the black candidates received about 53 percent of the primary vote. To capture that vote in the runoff, Johnson will have strong incentives to use a familiar strategy, emphasizing racial solidarity and identity politics. That’s ominous in a city already anxious and polarized about race, where race overlaps substantially with criminal-justice issues.
Unfortunately, Chicago has plenty of experience with “racial-mobilization” politics. It suffered the scars several decades ago, when white politicians used that strategy to hamstring a popular black mayor, Harold Washington.
The Hispanic vote is also in play — and Vallas will need it to win. In Chicago, that community includes Mexican Americans, Puerto Rican, and a variety of South American immigrants. Together, they are slightly larger than the black population, but far less influential politically. The African Americans have been engaged in city politics for much longer, are much better organized, and vote in larger percentages.
Vallas will also need at least some black support, or perhaps a lethargic turnout. He will strive to voters, whatever their race or ethnicity, who are fed up with daily murders, gang activity and lousy schools that limit their kids’ possibilities in a world that relies more and more on good education.
There is one slim area of agreement between the candidates. Neither wants to be tagged with the dismal legacy of Lori Lightfoot. Vallas, in particular, will remind them that she came into office on a fluffy cloud of big dreams, backed with very little practical experience running any organization. The dreams she sold so effectively to voters vanished once she was in office.
Lightfoot couldn’t deliver what voters wanted most, what they still want, what they consider essential from their local government. Whatever their race or income, they want safe streets, decent schools, well-maintained streets and other basic services. They don’t want to pay more for any of them, since they already pay sky-high taxes in Chicago on real estate, gas and consumer sales. For their money and their votes, they expect something in return. And they never got it.
Vallas’s strongest selling point is that he has the experience to actually deliver. Johnson is likely to counter with his progressive credentials and union activism, and perhaps a subtext of racial-identity politics. The more the runoff becomes a race about race, instead of policy and competence, the harsher the consequences for Chicago.
Biden Runs Into SCOTUS On Student Debt
Does the Constitution still matter? Nebraska’s AG argues it does:
“To some degree it’s always a little bit of reading the tea leaves, but I thought I the questions the justices asked were very positive. The justices focused pretty pretty heavily on the merits, in terms of where [in the HEROES Act] did Congress give the Department of Education the ability to have a $500 billion student loan discharge,” Hilgers said.
“There were quite a few questions from the chief justice and others about the fairness of this,” he continued. “Why does someone who gets student loan relief in one case, maybe someone else who just decided based on their own personal choices to not go to college, or someone who paid off their student loans early, not get relief here? Those kinds of tradeoffs should be in the hands of Congress versus the secretary of education.”
Nebraska, along with five other states, led a lawsuit against the program and earned an injunction that stopped the federal government from canceling any student debt pending the court’s decision. The Biden administration argues that it has the authority to forgive the loans under the HEROES Act, a piece of legislation passed in 2003 that allows the education secretary to “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” in connection with a “national emergency” — in this case, the White House claims, the Covid-19 pandemic.
Biden has put both of his predecessors to shame. In addition to his own barrage of environmental and social policy orders, Biden has used the COVID pandemic to claim “emergency” powers without precedent in American history.
The Supreme Court already blocked him from using workplace safety laws as an excuse to create a national vaccine mandate through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and — even more ridiculously — a nationwide tenant-eviction moratorium through the Centers for Disease Control.
Congress never made the CDC the nation’s landlord, and even Biden admitted he was just buying time until the Court could hear the case and stop him.
On Tuesday, the Court heard challenges to Biden’s attempt to spend half a trillion dollars cancelling the college and graduate school debts of 43 million people.
With whose money? The national debt, of course, because Congress didn’t appropriate funds for this or raise taxes or fees to pay for it.
Biden claims to be using the emergency powers of the HEROES Act passed after 9/11, the purpose of which was to let presidents suspend some student loan rules for soldiers serving abroad.
Even Nancy Pelosi and Biden’s own Department of Education warned him that he didn’t have the power to do this.
As for what Biden can do in response to a SCOTUS rebuttal, his options all have downsides. More and more, this looks like a 2022 election stunt — that worked!
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Items of Interest
Why anti-interventionism is not isolationism.
Jeffrey Sachs on great power politics.
Putin’s war rhetoric rallies Russia’s border towns.
Young: Hancock’s lockdown files show there was no Covid plandemic.
AMLO: Mexico is more democratic than U.S.A.
Domestic
Senate group wades into tough talk on Social Security reform.
Home foreclosures are ticking back up.
Boskin: Biden’s emerging credibility gap.
McCarthy pumps the brakes on releasing January 6th footage.
Riley: The need for child welfare agencies to assess disabilities.
FIRE Survey: 40 percent of liberal profs are afraid they’ll be fired.
2024
DeSantis oped: Why I stood up to Disney.
DeSantis fires back at Trump comments as “silly season”.
DeSantis pushes for “Medical Freedom”.
Tim Scott: I’m proof Democrats are wrong about America.
Media
Soave: GDI engaged in disinformation on their own advisory board.
Kobe Bryant photos: finally a settlement with family.
Health
Eli Lilly to cut prices of insulin drugs by 70 percent.
Ephemera
King Charles evicted Harry and Meghan from Frogmore when “Spare” published.
Could the Harry and Meghan eviction overshadow the coronation?
Eight questions Mandalorian Season 3 could answer.
Ali Wong on branching out from comedy to drama.
Larman: German patriotism collides with All Quiet On The Western Front.
The Idol: How the new series from Euphoria creator turned into a disaster.
Podcast
Quote
“I am not used to being called a son-of-a-bitch,” Sulzberger remarked to an editor after one unpleasant experience, “but I suppose I shall learn to like it.”
― Gay Talese