On Monday morning, TikTok asked a powerful appeals court to temporarily stop a law that could ban the app in the U.S. as soon as January 19.
On Monday morning, TikTok asked a powerful appeals court to temporarily stop a law that could ban the app in the U.S. as soon as January 19. Among the company’s rationales for the delay was the idea that the court should give the Trump Administration time to decide what it thinks about the law before it goes into effect.
That’s a bad argument. Courts don’t stop laws from going into effect just because a future president might not like them. And presidents don’t have the authority to repeal laws — that power belongs to Congress.
Already, national security lawyers have begun privately discussing Trump’s obligations to enforce the law under the “Take Care” clause of the Constitution, which requires presidents to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Interpretations of the clause vary widely, but most scholars agree that presidents have some duty under it to carry out the will of Congress, which overwhelmingly passed the TikTok law last April. In 2020, the conservative legal scholar John Yoo called the clause “a command to the president to put the laws into effect.”
That means the fight over the ban bill and the way Trump handles it could make precedent far beyond TikTok and social media — it could shape how much power Trump has to enforce or not enforce other laws, too.
When it comes to TikTok, The Trump Administration may well decide that it doesn’t want to enforce the law — the law would stay on the books, but the Administration could choose to not come after companies for noncompliance with it.
