The Senate supporters of House-passed legislation targeting TikTok have a message for anyone who would call it a “ban”: Get that filthy word out of your mouth.

“We are talking about a transition in ownership, not a ban, not elimination of TikTok—a transition of ownership that puts it in different hands but permits it to continue to exist,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Wednesday. “We’re not talking about messing with it; we’re not talking about screwing around with an asset; we’re not talking about disabling it. We’re talking about disarming it.”

Blumenthal was among the senators who attended a classified briefing Wednesday morning on national security threats posed by TikTok, the social video app that’s a subsidiary of China-based ByteDance. The House last week passed a bill that would give ByteDance 180 days to divest from TikTok or see the app, well, “prohibited” in the United States. The House vote was an overwhelming 352 to 65 in favor, a margin wide enough that supporters hoped that it would put pressure on the Senate to act.

But if the Senate is feeling pressured to act, it’s doing a good job hiding it. All Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would say after the House passed the bill was that “the Senate will review the legislation when it comes over from the House.” There’s no vote scheduled. There’s no timetable. There’s no certainty that the Senate will take up the House bill, produce a competing Senate alternative, or do anything on the subject in the near future.

There’s a whiff of intra-Congress rivalry in the way senators talk about the bill. Senators believe that they jam the House with legislation, not the other way around. Bills that arrive from the House, in their view, tend to be hotheaded and in need of deliberate adult revision, if they are lucky enough to be considered at all. Committees of jurisdiction will want their opportunity to shape any legislation, and individual members will want amendment votes, in order to leave their imprint on the final product. This exercise in ego management is the business of the Senate, and TikTok is relying on this cumbersome process to buy itself the time and space to execute a lobbying blitz.

© Slate