On January 3, the Liberty Justice Center filed its final reply brief in its constitutional challenge to the proposed federal TikTok ban, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down the ban for violating the free speech rights of the Liberty Justice Center’s client and millions of other Americans.
Following today’s filing, only one week remains until the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case on January 10. The Court is expected to issue an order before the ban takes effect on January 19, the day before the presidential inauguration.
In today’s brief, the Liberty Justice Center explains why the supposed “national security” justifications for the ban, as raised by Attorney General Merrick Garland in his brief defending the law—that is, preventing China from manipulating content and protecting Americans’ data privacy—cannot justify the ban’s unprecedented and sweeping infringement of TikTok users’ First Amendment rights.
“The government can’t avoid the First Amendment and shut down the speech of 170 million U.S. TikTok users by just saying the words ‘national security,’” said Jacob Huebert, President of the Liberty Justice Center and lead attorney for BASED Politics. “The Supreme Court should reject the government’s arguments, which would set a disturbing precedent that would threaten the free speech rights of every American.”
The Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit challenging the proposed TikTok ban on behalf of BASED Politics on June 6, 2024. After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected that and other challenges to the ban, the Liberty Justice Center and a group of TikTok creators jointly filed an emergency petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take up their cases on December 16. TikTok and its parent company ByteDance also filed a petition asking the Court to grant certiorari. On December 18, the Court issued an order granting the petitions and setting the cases for oral argument on January 10.
The Liberty Justice Center’s legal filings in BASED Politics Inc. v. Garland are available here.