Stargate/TikTok

[koriwhat]

I'm no fan of AI investment and def not into the concept trump proposed when it comes to TikTok joint partnership between our government and whomever buys TikTok. Fucking disgusted!

[Thread]

Amen.

[Blake]

Hour Ago
koriwhat
LMAO

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notthewordsofonewhokneels

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I'm sure this is a wonderful topic

[Winehole23]

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[Thread]

Hour Ago
koriwhat
LMAO

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notthewordsofonewhokneels

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I'm sure this is a wonderful topic

Ya hard ass, you.

[Winehole23]

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[koriwhat]

I'm no fan of AI investment and def not into the concept trump proposed when it comes to TikTok joint partnership between our government and whomever buys TikTok. Fucking disgusted!

https://www.spurstalk.com/forums/image.php?u=10674&dateline=1731106556

[SnakeBoy]

Whatever Trump wants he should get

He earned it

[Thread]

Whatever Trump wants he should get

He earned it

Amen.

[Winehole23]

Whatever Trump wants he should get

He earned itwhat horseshit, I guess it's toothpaste to you

[Winehole23]

A White House official said Musk “very much” got over his skis when the tech tycoon launched a daylong screed against the AI project. One Trump ally said Musk abused his closeness to the president. Another Republican close to the White House went further, saying Trump’s staff is “furious” over Musk using his massive social media platform to pour cold water on the infrastructure deal that Trump called “tremendous” and “monumental” just a day prior.

“It’s clear he has abused the proximity to the president,” said the Trump ally. “The problem is the president doesn’t have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero fucks.”

[ChumpDumper]

Infrastructure Week!

[Winehole23]

Bondi seems to have claimed a dispensing power for Trump

The "Take care" clause probably comes from the political reaction against the dispensing power



Although it may seem like a distant memory at this point, it was only on January 17—less than six months ago—that the Supreme Court, after hyper-expedited merits review, upheld the TikTok statute against a First Amendment challenge (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_new_3dq3.pdf). On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order that promised not to enforce the statute for 75 days (a period that could be renewed). But it was only after Attorney General Bondi sent letters to various U.S. tech companies some time later that full access to TikTok was restored—letters that, at least at the time, were not made public (or even leaked). Given that timing, the natural question that arose was what, exactly, Bondi had promised to the tech companies to get them to turn the switch back on?

Late last week, in response to FOIA requests, 21 of those letters were made public (https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/25989866-25-3980-nd-cal-response-07032025/). The letters are worth reading in their entirety (in some cases, multiple letters to the same company sent at different times were included). But to summarize the highlights, across those letters, the Attorney General of the United States memorialized some variation of the following three conclusions:



Companies that continue to support the TikTok app are not, in fact, violating the TikTok statute;
The TikTok statute is “properly read” to not “infringe upon . . . core Presidential national security and foreign affairs powers”; and
The Department of Justice is “irrevocably relinquishing any claims the United States might have had” against the recipients of the letters for both previous and ongoing violations of the act.



Each of these three arguments is ludicrous. The first argument is inconsistent with the literal text of the statute—which is not exactly ambiguous about what it prohibits. Unless TikTok’s Chinese owners divested by January 19 (and they didn’t), U.S. companies are barred from:


Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.


Of course, “providing services” to distribute, maintain, or update the TikTok app is … literally what these companies are doing. Thus, there is no plausible argument that these companies are not violating the TikTok statute; they are continuing to do exactly what it bars.

And as University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein has pointed out (https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-government-s-astonishing-constitutional-claims-on-tiktok), because the statute is not in any way ambiguous, the second argument is also frivolous; there is no way to “properly read” the statute to “avoid” a constitutional question. (As Rozenshtein explains, the constitutional question isn’t actually difficult, here, either; other constitutional issues aside, the statute falls well within Congress’s Article I power to regulate foreign commerce, and with respect to Article II, the statute doesn’t require the President—as opposed to U.S. tech companies—to stop doing … anything.) But it’s the third argument, in particular, that reflects a truly scary potential expansion of executive power—to encompass a prerogative that English kings exercised only until 1689, and that the Founders decisively rejected.

The “dispensing” power claimed by pre-18th-century English kings was the power to decide, on an ad hoc basis, which laws could and should be set aside in individual cases—to exempt the King’s favorites not just from the retrospective operation of criminal laws (for which after-the-fact pardons could have the same effect), but from the retrospective and prospective application of civil laws, as well. The idea was that the King could literally “dispense” with application of whichever laws he wanted, for whatever reasons he wanted, in whatever cases he wanted.

One of the centerpieces of the English Bill of Rights, adopted by Parliament in 1689 at the end of the Glorious Revolution (as part of a package of reforms that had both the purpose and effect of pushing England toward a constitutional monarchy), was the express abolition of the dispensing power. And when the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787, the Take Care Clause of Article II (requiring the President to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”) was largely understood as a repudiation of any dispensing authority (https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-ii/clauses/348). Indeed, the Supreme Court would reassert that understanding in 1838 (https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep037/usrep037524/usrep037524.pdf), noting that a “dispensing power”


has no countenance for its support in any part of the Constitution, and is asserting a principle which, if carried out in its results to all cases falling within it, would be clothing the President with a power entirely to control the legislation of Congress and paralyze the administration of justice.


Not even the staunchest defenders of the unitary executive theory have argued otherwise—because, however much power the President may have over the executive branch, it was (and always has been) understood that a dispensing power is trampling on the legislature’s constitutional prerogative. Presidents may, at various points in American history, have declined to enforce certain statutes for certain periods of time based on their belief that the statute is unconstitutional (https://www.justice.gov/file/147181/dl?inline). But the power to decline to enforce a statute just isn’t the same thing as the dispensing power; the former does nothing to alter the potential liability that those who violate the statute might face; the latter at least purports to render them formally immune.1 (https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/165-tiktok-and-the-dispensing-power#footnote-1-167653972)

The tricky part here isn’t that Bondi’s approach is blatantly unconstitutional; it’s that it’s difficult to remedy through litigation. As Rozenshtein has pointed out, it’s not at all clear who might have standing to challenge the letters (or the Trump administration’s broader behavior vis-a-vis TikTok) in court. Perhaps one of TikTok’s competitors could, but there are some fairly obvious political reasons why they might choose not to do so. And so here, again, we come back to what has been the most fundamental breakdown in the separation of powers over the last 5.5 months—the fecklessness of Congress.

At other points in American history, we might’ve expected Congress to assert its institutional prerogatives against an executive branch purporting to exercise a dispensing power—by blocking nominees (or impeaching appointees like the Attorney General); by cutting off funding; or by otherwise making life difficult for the executive branch until and unless it played ball with the legislature. Of course, there’s no reason to expect any of these reactions anytime soon. If anything, the exercise of a dispensing power vis-a-vis TikTok, specifically, takes Congress off the hook for the mess it arguably created when it passed the TikTok statute last year.

But there is an immense danger in Bondi’s assertion of a dispensing power here—that it might set a precedent for assertions of the same authority in future cases in which the dispensations are far less popular and far more corrupting. As the Supreme Court put it in 1886 (https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep116/usrep116616/usrep116616.pdf), “illegitimate and unconstitutional practices get their first footing in that way, namely, by silent approaches and slight deviations from legal modes of procedure.”
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/165-tiktok-and-the-dispensing-power

[Winehole23]

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[koriwhat]

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I have convictions and I'm sticking to them. TikTok and everything CCP China should be banned! :tu