The United States Keeps Hitting Snooze on the Emergency TikTok Ban ⇥ techdirt.com

Alex Leary, Wall Street Journal:

President Trump is planning to give TikTok another lifeline.

With a mid-June deadline approaching and trade talks with China in limbo, Trump is expected to sign an executive order staving off enforcement of a law banning or forcing the sale of the app, according to people familiar with his plan.

It would be the third extension since Trump took office in January. The current one expires June 19.

One way to view this is as an indictment of the supposed urgency of this law. Another is through the lens of this increasingly lawless administration.

Mike Masnick, Techdirt:

But, also, even if the entire law weren’t a moral panic smokescreen, we have a more fundamental problem: in a country where the rule of law is functioning, presidents don’t get to selectively ignore federal laws via executive order. That’s not how the Constitution is supposed to work. But Trump is doing exactly that — and worse, he’s using the threat of future enforcement as leverage to engineer his preferred outcome.

I know most every country has flexible interpretations of law enforcement, and this all occurs on a scale. I know this has been the case for past U.S. presidents; I, too, have read Chomsky. But the actions of this administration are sliding further on that scale toward a corrupt and authoritarian regime. Kicking the can down the road on the divest-or-ban requirements of this law is just as much a part of that story as the rest of the hostile domestic and foreign acts so far undertaken by this president.