The silliness of the ban itself aside, it is wild how casually the whole “both chambers of congress passed a law and that law was upheld by the highest federal court but maybe it won’t be a law if one guy decides he doesn’t like it” thing is being treated by the media.

It is like “Does America have laws?” is a 3 minute section of Good Morning America between low-carb breakfast recipes and the memoir of a skateboarding dog.

As with anywhere, laws are toothless without enforcement.

In some cases, they are enforced ruthlessly on one group of people, and not on others. This is a feature, not a mistake, by the way. Well, a feature for those with power, not normal citizens.

The real question is:

"Does America have justice?"

It's not a recent one either. The issue of select enforcement of our laws has been around as long as I can recall, and before I was born. It's not even unique to the United States.

What I find most upsetting as part of the normal citizenry, is that rather than taking things to court and finding that the laws need changed, they tend to go the route of charges dropped or pardons when the laws affect them.

I would have less of an issue with the rich and powerful folks avoiding prosecution if they at least did it in a precedent setting way for the rest of us.

That's the injustice.

Knowledge of civics among the media is unfortunately not much higher than the average person, which is a real failure considering that they are supposed to be an entire “estate” of democratic society.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate

> but maybe it won’t be a law if one guy decides he doesn’t like it

Are you talking about a presidential veto? What are you saying?

Creating three branches of government that all have to agree that a law should exist (legislative) is constitutional (judicial) and should be enforced (executive) has proven to be an excellent method of keeping bad laws from negatively affecting us. Despite being seemingly simple on the surface, it's created a process a bit longer than what a single Schoolhouse Rock video can teach us, and it's too much for legacy media to handle.

Maybe they only learned from the aforementioned Schoolhouse Rock video, because they seem especially bad at understanding anything outside of the legislative branch. Not only does the legislative branch need to pass a bill into law for it to become a regulation, without objection by the judicial branch to its constitutionality, but the executive branch needs to write that law into a federal regulation, and the legislative branch can reject any new regulation they believe doesn't comply with the law, as can the judicial branch, who can also reject the regulation if it isn't constitutional as written, even if the original law that created it was.

It's no wonder that legacy media's wild misunderstandings of how laws and regulations work only get a small snippet of time, between their more entertaining and feel-good stories that drive viewership and revenue.

Fortunately we are no longer stuck with just legacy media, so I recommend finding a news source that actually knows what they are talking about. I've found the best bet is to get news from outlets and aggregators that specialize in a specific topic, shielding them from the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, and forcing them to publish news that is actually correct.

This is why I come to Hacker News for my tech news aggregation. For political news, my favorite so far has been The Hill, especially for videos like their Daily Brief and Rising videos published on YouTube. I'm open to more, so if anyone has any recommendations, let me know.

This is just checks-and-balances at work, is it not? It’s by design.

“I was proud to join 352 of my Republican and Democrat colleagues and pass H.R. 7521 today. CCP-controlled TikTok is an enormous threat to U.S. national security and young Americans’ mental health. This past week demonstrated the Chinese Communist Party is capable of mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions. The Senate must pass this bill and send it to the president’s desk immediately.”[1]

[1] https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mcca...

U.S. national security: "mobilizing the platform’s users to a range of dangerous, destabilizing actions"

And give me a break on "young Americans’ mental health".

This bill was about pro-Palestine content ... "being mobilized by CCP" and was harming young people's health.

The fact that none of this was put forward by the lawyers makes me think the tiktok lawyers were incompetent.

Both Biden and Trump have said that they will not enforce this law. So not just "one guy", but two :)

Wait until you hear about how one ordinary guy on a jury can nullify a whole law. Our system is geared to err towards enforcing fewer laws.