The tweak that made the forced divestment of TikTok much more likely

House Speaker Mike Johnson is making another run at freeing TikTok from Chinese government influence.

A significant tweak this time around appears to have already made it more likely that the measure will reach President Biden’s desk.

The updated bill will give China's ByteDance one year to divest TikTok or face a US ban. That’s an increase from the six months that were offered when the bill first passed last month.

Johnson formally released the bill Wednesday, and it could receive a House vote by this weekend.

But the adjustment is already paying dividends in the Senate, which has looked upon the bill warily. One of the most prominent Senate holdouts has been Senate Commerce Committee Chair Maria Cantwell. She had helped slow progress on the bill but is now on board.

"I’m very happy that Speaker Johnson and House leaders incorporated my recommendation to extend the ByteDance divestment period from six months to a year," she said in a statement late Wednesday evening.

She said the extended divestment period will allow a new buyer enough time to get a deal done and, as a result, "I support this updated legislation."

Cantwell is now in league with influential Senate figures like Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) who were already on board and already pushing for a Senate vote.

Final passage, of course, remains far from a sure thing. The amended TikTok bill is one piece of a complicated suite of bills that Speaker Johnson is hoping to pass in sequence, which includes a host of hot-button issues from aid to Israel and Ukraine to the selling off assets seized from Russian oligarchs.

It’s a complicated gambit for the embattled speaker and one that could lead to an attempt to oust Johnson using a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair. Two GOP lawmakers are already openly calling for his ouster.

"I am not resigning. And it is, in my view, an absurd notion that someone would bring a vacate motion," Johnson shot back earlier this week. "We’re simply here trying to do our job."

But the progress on the TikTok side of the equation suggests that at least that issue could be coming to a head sooner rather than later.

If enacted, the bill would set in motion a process that could lead to a ban on a key news source for young people and one with 170 million American users.

But it's also an app that collects vast amounts of information about Americans and is owned by a company, ByteDance, that its critics say is under the control of the Chinese government.

ByteDance executives regularly deny the charge. "It is unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill that would trample the free speech rights of 170 million Americans," TikTok responded Wednesday in a statement.

Politico also reported that even the Chinese government is getting involved, as diplomats quietly meet with Hill staffers to try and stall momentum on the TikTok bill.

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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