Can the TikTok bill survive the Senate?

It sailed through the House. It got a quick thumbs up from the White House. But Congress’s controversial new bill that could potentially ban TikTok is so far earning a mixed reaction in the Senate, leaving its chances of passage open to question.

House members passed the legislation 352-65 on Wednesday, despite a furious last minute lobbying effort by TikTok, which included rallying its users to flood their representatives’ phone lines (the tactic appeared to backfire by angering lawmakers, some of whom thought it demonstrated in real time how the platform could be used for political purposes).

After the House vote, White House Press Secretary Karine Jeane-Pierre told reporters the administration hoped that the Senate “takes this up very quickly.” President Biden has previously said he would sign the legislation.

The prospects for quick movement in the upper chamber appeared unclear, however. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer remained noncommittal Wednesday, saying in a statement only that the Senate will “review the legislation when it comes over from the House.”

Senate Commerce Chair Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who is drafting a competing bill, also didn’t appear ready to wave through the House’s legislation, which would force TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell the platform’s U.S. operations within 5 months or face a ban.

“Following today’s House vote, I will be talking to my Senate and House colleagues to try to find a path forward that is constitutional and protects civil liberties,” Cantwell said in a statement.

The TikTok bill has faced resistance from a coalition of libertarians and progressives, who’ve voiced concerns about free speech and singling out a single social media platform for regulation, as well as former President Donald Trump, who has argued that banning the app would unfairly benefit competitors he personally holds a grudge against, particularly Facebook.

Still, the legislation picked up some crucial backers in the Senate on Wednesday, most notably Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., the panel’s top Republican.

“We got to get something done,” Warner told Semafor in a Wednesday phone interview. “We’re going into a 24-hour election cycle, where literally millions of Americans get a lot of their news from this site. And if that can be manipulated against American interests — I don’t care whether you’re Democrat or Republican, that is not in America’s interest.”

Warner said he believes the enormous bipartisan support in the lower chamber “absolutely” puts pressure on the Senate to act. “I do think there’s a recognition that if we [can’t] put some guardrails around social media on a company that I don’t think anybody doubts is ultimately controlled by the Chinese Communist Party in an election year, then shame on us,” Warner said.

It’s not the first time that Congress has attempted to curtail TikTok. In 2022, lawmakers approved a measure banning the app from government devices. But the Senate landscape for the House bill could end up being rocky.

Warner previously sponsored another bipartisan bill that would hand broad power to the Commerce Department to crack down on foreign products that raise national security concerns, particularly from nations considered US adversaries like Russia or China. It fizzled out last year amid resistance from the same coalition of progressives and libertarians now voicing skepticism about the current bill.

Warner didn’t rule out amending the House’s bill. He said he still harbored legal concerns that he’s working through with officials at the Department of Justice, citing past court challenges that frustrated the Trump administration’s efforts to ban the app through executive order.

During the House GOP retreat in West Virginia on Wednesday, Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters he planned to pressure Schumer to bring the TikTok bill to the floor. Many, if not most Republican senators are still deciding how to cast their votes. But there does seem to be broad appetite to curtail TikTok’s influence.

“It’s not about TikTok, It’s about TikTok’s DNA,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Semafor. “It’s about their lineage. It’s not about TikTok as a platform and we wouldn’t be having this discussion if it was a US-based firm that didn’t have a history of being a data collection outpost for the CCP.”

On Wednesday, Tilis told reporters that he believes the strong bipartisan support in the House “bodes well for the Senate.”

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., another early Senate supporter of the House bill, pushed back against the idea that the legislation would actually ban TikTok. “Let me be very clear: this legislation to restrict TikTok does NOT ban the app,” he wrote on X. “It separates ties to the Chinese Communist Party and prevents them from accessing the data of Americans—especially our kids.”

Notable: Fetterman told Semafor last week that he’d spent a lot of money on an expensive skincare brand made popular on TikTok called “Drunk Elephant” for his daughter. “That makes me hate TikTok immediately,” he joked.