When, on Friday, the Supreme Court hears the Biden administration defend the law that bans TikTok, the justices should remember what the administration said the previous Friday: “National security” justifies the president’s blocking the sale of U.S. Steel to Nippon Steel of Japan. Formulaic uses of that phrase give a patina of respectability to government’s abuses — concentration camps in the past, control of the internet in the future.

Oscar Wilde was said to have remarked that anyone who could read Charles Dickens on the death of Little Nell (in “The Old Curiosity Shop”) without laughing “must have a heart of stone.” Anyone who can read with a straight face Joe Biden on his “solemn responsibility” to protect U.S. “security” from a privately held corporation, almost a quarter owned by non-Japanese, must be incapable of laughter.

More than 2,000 U.S. corporations have market capitalizations larger than U.S. Steel, which has fewer employees (21,800) than Krispy Kreme, which manufactures doughnuts. The U.S. military requires a minuscule portion (in 2017, 3 percent) of domestic steel production. Japan is a steadfast ally that, while Nippon’s $14.9 billion purchase is being blocked, is purchasing vital U.S. weapons systems. Biden is as allergic to such facts, as is his successor, who also opposes the sale even though:

Nippon has promised to pay $5 billion more than the company’s market capitalization.

And to keep U.S. Steel’s headquarters in Pittsburgh.

And to give $5,000 bonuses to the company’s steelworkers.

And to abide by all union contracts.

And to let the U.S. government reject any reductions in U.S. Steel’s production capacity.

And to spend $2.7 billion modernizing what Biden delusionally calls “this vital American company,” which has withered by becoming dependent on U.S. government tariffs, subsidies and “Buy American” rules.

TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, has approximately 170 million American users. Granted, TikTok is inescapably beholden to an adversary nation’s sinister government. But in 1965, a unanimous Supreme Court overturned a law that burdened Americans’ “right to receive” propaganda from such a nation: the Soviet Union.

Sixty years and many technological developments later, it is increasingly urgent not to acquiesce in the U.S. government’s insinuating itself even deeper than it already is into the sinister business of superintending Americans’ access to information and ideas. The government is preemptively banning TikTok. There has been no precipitating event, not even a measurable change wrought by TikTok in U.S. public opinion regarding China. (Not that controlling public opinion is Congress’s job.)

We have been here before. During World War II, the Army general who justified the “evacuation” of West Coast Japanese saw something “ominous” in seeing nothing: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.” The national security threat’s absence confirmed its imminence.

In 1952, during the Korean War, the Supreme Court disallowed President Harry S. Truman’s national security executive order seizing steel plants to ensure production during a labor dispute. This came eight years after the court, in one of its worst decisions, upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s national security (“military necessity”) rationale for removing 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to concentration camps.

In the steel seizure case, the court deemed Truman’s national security rationale insufficient, absent congressional authorization. Regarding today’s two controversies:

Granted, Congress created the process that culminated in Biden’s decision against Nippon and U.S. Steel. And Congress has recklessly delegated to presidents its constitutionally enumerated power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.” And Congress passed the law to ban TikTok. Those considerations should not, however, immunize either the Nippon or the TikTok decisions from judicial scrutiny.

The nation needs a due process challenge to the facially corrupt maneuvering that produced the decision against Nippon, a decision opposed by 98 percent of U.S. Steel shareholders, and probably most of the company’s workers. The decision should be called an unconstitutional taking of property without just compensation. And a gross abridgment of the First Amendment guarantee of robust expression free from government supervision.

Around the world, not least in the European Union, governments are eager to curate the internet for their purposes of social control. U.S. government censorship comes clad in mincing insincerities about “content moderation” to protect the gullible masses from “misinformation,” “disinformation” or “malinformation.”

During the pandemic, Biden said insufficient censorship by social media companies was “killing people.” His administration pressured all-too-compliant companies to suppress content, much of it true. The pandemic has gone. Other excuses for censorship (racism, hate, climate change, disrespect for “science,” a public health crisis, etc.) are coming.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.