When the Intelligence Community and the ADL both support legislation and it sails through the House of Representative with little discussion or debate, something mischievous is surely afoot. From Michael Tracey at mtracey.substack.com:
On November 20, 2023, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA), chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote in a joint letter to the CEO of TikTok that the platform was guilty of “stoking anti-Semitism, support, and sympathy for Hamas” after the October 7 attack on Israel. “This deluge of pro-Hamas content is driving hateful anti-Semitic rhetoric and violent protests on campuses across the country,” McMorris Rodgers charged. A year ago, in March 2023, she had already declared: “TikTok should be banned in the United States of America.”
This week the plan came to fruition, with McMorris Rodgers and her colleagues orchestrating what could be best described as a legislative sneak attack: suddenly the House of Representatives, a notoriously dysfunctional body — particularly this Congressional term, with all the Republican leadership turmoil — took decisive, concerted, expedited action to pass legislation banning TikTok before most of the public would have even gotten a chance to notice. The bill was introduced March 5, 2024, advanced by a unanimous committee vote on March 7, 2024, then approved for final passage March 13, 2024. Almost nothing ever passes Congress at such warp-speed.
McMorris Rodgers facilitated the unanimous 50-0 vote out of the Energy and Commerce committee, a development which took many in DC off-guard, even those keenly attuned to the TikTok policy issue. As someone familiar with the process explained to me, before introducing the bill, the key sponsors “wanted to keep it quiet all around,” as they correctly surmised that once the details of the bill gained wider public exposure, opposition would mount — just as happened in March 2023 when a precursor bill got derailed after public awareness grew of provisions delegating enormous new powers to the President to control speech online.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 