Rep. Kat Cammack: Why Rand Paul is wrong about TikTok

Congresswoman Kammack joins us now. I believe, are you in Washington or back in Florida? No, we actually, we're on our Republican retreat right now, so we're just outside of Washington. You are in Greenbrier, which is beautiful, where we had an alternate government set in case of a nuclear bomb. Did they tour you through that yet? Yeah, the bunker underneath the resort area, it's stunning. I mean, it's actually, it's pretty terrifying to think of that scenario, but it is remarkable how they had a mock Congress. They had a Senate floor, a House floor, the decon, the MREs, I mean, barracks for members of Congress and their families. I mean, it was pretty staggering to go through there and see what that was set up for in case of an emergency. Yeah, I did a whole feature on it.

It's on Fox Nation, you can look it up. Congresswoman Kammack, when you put forward, helped design the TikTok bill, did you expect 300 votes for it? I, you know, it's interesting. I was talking to colleagues last week because I serve on the committee of jurisdiction that this had to actually go through in order to get it to the House floor. And the conversations were very much a microcosm of what we would anticipate on the House floor. And as we started really dispelling some of the rumors and the myths around TikTok and getting through to people on why this is so important that they divest, that we have them break up with the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party. I started getting more confident about its chances in the House. And at one point I looked at, I looked at the chairwoman and I said, I think we're going to have 350 votes on the floor. And yesterday we had 352 yes votes to force TikTok to break up with the CCP. Do you think that that number will sway whether the Senate takes it up or not?

I think they have to. That number is staggering, especially in the dynamics that we have today. Of course, there's all kinds of interesting personalities in the Senate. I'm not saying that there aren't in the House, that's for sure. But in the Senate, it's a little bit of a different ballgame.

But I think you're going to see Schumer, McConnell. I've seen where Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, some very interesting bedfellows coming together who recognize the threat. And so just from the sheer fact that they recognize how important this is for national security. And sometimes I feel like people get a little dodgy on the national security thing.

They're like, oh, they always want to say that. No, I wouldn't want my government having this type of information about me. I wouldn't want big tech having this type of access. Why the heck would we do anything to allow the CCP to have this type of access? So I think people are recognizing that and it will get its vote in the Senate.

The process might be a little bit unconventional, but I think it will get there. So guys like Rand Paul are out. Marjorie Taylor Greene is out and Matt Gaetz are out. Who would think that these guys would be trouble? Here is Senator Rand Paul, cut 11. I think when you're alleged of a crime, you have to be convicted of it. So you can't really take someone's property in our country without a conviction. That's in the Fifth Amendment. You have to have due process to take someone's company from them or force them to sell.

But even beyond the Fifth Amendment, the First Amendment says that those 180 million Americans who express themselves on the platform have a right as well. There's already been a preliminary decision by a federal district judge in Montana that tried to ban this. There were two decisions under Donald Trump when he tried to ban this.

They've all been found unconstitutional. Your thoughts? Oh, man, Brian, I have great respect for Rand Paul. I consider him a great friend, a dear friend, but I disagree with him on this.

Let me just go through this. This is not a bill of attainder. We're not talking about content moderation.

It's a 10 page bill. Anyone can read it. There's no mention of content moderation. What we're talking about is conduct, the conduct of which the CCP has engaged in stealing and harvesting the data of 170 million Americans and then using that data to commit fraud, crimes, et cetera. And we've seen that where they've used geolocation data against journalists writing stories that they didn't like. And I will also remind everyone that there is no First Amendment right to espionage. That is not espionage is not one of the five tenets of the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment where we have these warrantless seizures of data where this this app can go through your phone.

It taps into your keystrokes, your financial data, your contacts, everyone who you're talking to, your emails. That is what they have access to. And that is, again, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. And again, I should remind everyone that the CCP as a foreign adversary, they don't get to enjoy the constitutional protections and rights that everyday Americans do. That is what we're targeting here. The CCP, not Americans.

It's a very narrow, thoughtful, tailored bill to address the issue of a foreign adversary controlling a massive, massive information, asymmetric warfare platform that will be used against us. I mean, is this about time to look at the bigger picture and just have a list of nations in which can never launch a social media platform? North Korea, Iran, Russia, China. Can we put that on a list so we can stop the next infiltration?

And that's the thing. You know, those countries that you just named, those are in statute in U.S. code already defined as a foreign adversary. And so this bill is really just clarifying. It's not expanding any government power. So North Korea launches their version of TikTok.

It would never get in the app store? Well, under this bill, once this goes through, it sets a precedent that they would not. So we're going to list nations?

Like, should we put England in a different category than Russia? Well, like I said, foreign adversaries already defined in statute, and that includes North Korea, Iran, China, Russia. So that is already law. And I also reminded my colleagues as we were going through this process over the last couple of days, this is the exact same executive order, only a little bit more tailored. This one is a bit more narrow than the executive order that President Donald Trump put forward just a few years ago.

So when I was talking to my friend Marjorie Taylor Greene about this, she said, you know, I don't think we should be focusing on this. I think we should be focusing on the Chinese buying our farmland. And I agree. But we can start with 170 million pieces of real estate that the Chinese government owns right now. And that's in our phones. That right there is the immediate threat. And I think that it's not the one side fits all answer to what we've got going on. We have tons of challenges, but we have to start somewhere.

And this is an immediate threat. Listen, I hear you, but you could also go right back and go for the Chinese land. I mean, why are we letting that happen? Why are we letting Russia buy Russia oligarchs buy buildings here?

Is that still going on? So we should be able to, you guys should be able to address that. And I think you can get bipartisan support. Anything you guys can do in a bipartisan way I think is good for everybody.

Yeah, and one thing that was frustrating was I'm an equal opportunity offender. I think that we should be addressing Metta and Google and their use of people's data. And we actually have a bill that's coming to the floor next week that does just that, that says you cannot sell data to foreign adversaries.

You cannot use data in X, Y, Z way. And so that bill is coming to the floor. I anticipate that will also have a very strong cross section of support across Congress. But these are the things that are frustrating for me that aren't being talked about more in the news. It seems like we're being distracted with shiny objects when there's really tough, challenging, and pressing issues. And so I mean, I know I'm preaching the choir here, Brian, but you know as well as I do that man, if it doesn't bleed, it doesn't lead. And really the really nefarious, scary things that are happening in our country go without very little coverage.

So I'm glad and appreciative that you're covering this. Absolutely, so a couple of things. What is going on with the majority in the House? I hear that you can't even get everybody to go to West Virginia to Greenbrier for your retreat because you guys don't want to be around each other. We watch Ken Buck resign, we watch Kevin McCarthy resign, Mike Gallagher resign while you're in the majority.

And clearly you can't give up the chances of being in them. Even Democrats know that it's not a given they're gonna be in the majority after 2024. So could you describe what's going on here without an experienced leader like Kevin McCarthy? You know, I call what we're living through right now in American politics, the era of anger attainment. It is a business model for politicians where they stomp their feet, they give a fire-breathing speech, and they scream about how they're fighting the establishment, fighting the man, and fighting for you back home. And what they're doing is they're giving a speech to an empty chamber, to a C-SPAN camera, and then their team is clipping it on the back end and then they're sending it around and saying, give me $5 because I'm fighting for you.

Now, that has become the new business model in Washington. Again, anger attainment. I think that is the only way to describe what is going on because it is all about keeping people frustrated and mad and outraged and giving someone to blame. And what that has done is create tremendous strife amongst Congress.

And that goes on the right and the left. People, they're like, I saw what you said about this and that, and I'll have you know. And it's really just eroding the camaraderie that you need in order to get stuff done. And on top of that, I have, again, I've only been in Congress for two terms, so not a whole lot of experience in Congress. But the first thing that I've been able to pick up on is that Washington, they don't want to solve anything because that is where they derive their power. The power in Congress is derived from problems. And the minute that you solve them, you are giving away your leverage. And so there's real no incentive to solve anything.

And so that just further erodes at the trust and the efforts to actually get something done. So my goal has been to really recruit people from around the country that come from backgrounds like mine. I was homeless at one point in time, commercial sandblasting, you know, working class family.

Mom was single parent. I want to see real Americans with really interesting stories and real life experience in Congress with a hunger to do something and put aside the B.S. politics and do something for our country because I don't feel that we're going to be able to survive if we keep going down this path. We've got to stay in the majority and it's going to be Speaker Hadeem Jeffries and have what is the strategy because we know the RNC is not going to be much help. They're basically broke.

Yeah, that's been a real frustrating issue for us is the fact that it's always just status quo business as usual. One of the things that I'm doing is I'm now the recruitment chair for the House of Representatives on the political arm. And the irony of that is when I ran for Congress, Brian, they did not want me. I came out of the largest primary field in the state of Florida. I had 12 at one point running against me and I had multimillionaires, self-funders. And that's who Washington is always typically like.

You know, somebody who can write a check, big checks. And so they didn't want me. They were actually very resistant to my campaign. So the irony of me now being the recruitment chair is kind of it's kind of funny.

But the conditions that I took in order to do this job, I said, I want to do this my way. I want different type of people in Washington, people who actually are going to do the job they were sent to Washington to do. And then we need to chase the ballot.

I've seen it too many times where they recruit these candidates and then they leave them high and dry. We're not doing that. We're going to go and we're going to put teams in every single competitive district in America where you have a staffer that all they do all day, every day is chase ballots. If it's legal to ballot harvest in that state, we're going to ballot harvest.

If you're doing absentee, we're going to do absentee. If it's early voting, we're going to get our people out to vote because we've seen time and time again where we lose the New York three in that special, you know, 11000 early votes were in and we lost by 11000 early votes. We have to start playing the same game that the Democrats have been doing. We have to start fighting fire with fire. Right.

And I'm on a mission to do that. All right. Congresswoman Kat Cammack, congratulations on the tick tock, the tick tock bill to get rid of it or sell it. We'll see if the Senate can keep the momentum going and say hello to Jim Justice.

The governor owns that place. Congressman, thank you. Appreciate you. Right. Have a good one. Right. He might be the next senator from West Virginia. In fact, I can almost guarantee it.