Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton and GOP Sen. Pete Ricketts have diverged from President-elect Donald Trump's stance on the TikTok ban, which went into effect over the weekend, resulting in the app being shut down. Cotton and Ricketts emphasized that there is no legal basis for extending the ban's effective date now that it has been implemented.
Despite TikTok going dark, there is a possibility that the decision may not be final. President-elect Trump indicated that he is likely to seek a delay in the ban once he assumes office. He expressed his support for TikTok in a recent post on Truth Social.
Former President Joe Biden had signed a law in April, giving ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, 270 days to sell the app to a U.S. or ally-based owner to avoid a ban. The Supreme Court upheld the ban last Friday.
While the law allows a president to postpone the ban for 90 days through an executive order, Trump cannot overturn a law passed by Congress and signed by a former president using an executive order.
The only lasting solutions to maintain TikTok's availability seem to be either enacting a new law to reverse the existing one, which could be challenging given the broad bipartisan support for the current legislation, or compelling ByteDance to sell TikTok to an acceptable purchaser.
