The Senate Majority leader voted to ban TikTok from U.S. app stores beginning Jan. 19, 2025. This pending ban attempts to pressure Chinese-owned ByteDance to sell the social media platform. The ban was signed into law by President Joe Biden in April.

“TikTok clearly hopes that the next administration will be more sympathetic to its plight than the incumbent administration. In other words, delay is the point,” McConnell wrote in his brief, referring to President-elect Donald Trump.

Trump joined the platform during his campaign and, less than a week later, promised he “will never ban TikTok.” Since then, the president-elect has garnered over 14 million followers and credited the platform for winning the youth vote by 34 points. Trump is still committed to “take a look at TikTok.”

While the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on Jan. 10, it has yet to grant an emergency injunction, which would temporarily block the ban. Delaying the ban by just a day would mean that Trump would officially be in power and have presidential authority over the ban.

The Foreign Adversaries Act allows the president to decide which countries are deemed “foreign adversaries” and thus ban their apps from app stores.

In the weeks following Biden signing the law, TikTok filed its lawsuit alleging that the ban would violate the platform’s First Amendment rights. That lawsuit was followed by another similar lawsuit filed by TikTok users. A U.S. Appeals Court upheld the law, but TikTok asked the Supreme Court to grant an injunction until it could consider the case.