A plan to rush through Big Tech antitrust legislation began as a bipartisan effort, but Senator Amy Klobuchar is finding herself losing Republican support due to her own actions.

Her bill initially had support from Republicans like Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and John Kennedy (R-Louisiana), but the former has reportedly been backing away from it and the latter may want to walk away entirely.

Here and at the Wall Street Journal, among other places, Republicans have been warned that they were stepping into a trap, and Klobuchar seems ready to spring it as she works to make the bill more palatable to Democratic Senators Big Tech’s primary home.

California Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Alex Padilla, both Democrats, supported the leading tech antitrust bill in the Senate Judiciary Committee last month , but demanded significant changes if it is to get their support on the Senate floor.

That bill, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, would prohibit the dominant technology companies from boosting their own products versus competitors.

The companies, which strongly oppose the leading bill and have poured millions of dollars into combatting it, argue it would compromise consumer privacy and security, and interfere with their ability to provide popular products, such as map and search apps.

The Democrats’ bill is the tip of the spear of a handful of major pieces of legislation in both chambers that would rein in the tech companies.

A companion Senate bill, which prohibits the companies from giving preference to their own products in their app stores, will go before the same committee later this week. Another group of regulatory bills, one of which would make it easier to break up major tech companies, is sitting in the House.

In ramming through the bill and then looking to water down what it will do in order to appease the Senators from California, whose constituents are the Big Tech companies, Klobuchar is going to struggle to hit 60 votes if she decides to abandon her bipartisan allies for the insanely partisan colleagues who are more motivated by keeping the companies in their state happy.

Not that this bill was even that great to begin with. The problems with this bill are numerous. It creates a lot of new regulations where there don’t need to be any. It forces companies to not promote their own apps over competitors. Ostensibly, this is a good idea. In practice, it allows for, among other things, suspicious apps and services to become more prominent. There are several of them out there that profess to offer a good or service, but simply collect your information, personal and financial.

It also has a provision for up to a 15 percent seizure of a company’s US revenue during the violation period – which goes straight to the treasury and not to reimburse “victims” of the “antitrust” practice.

It’s more government control and regulation that won’t solve the big tech problem. It appears that some of the Republicans are catching on, though. If Grassley and Kennedy are talking about walking away, that’s bad news for technocratic Democrats who want to bring these Big Tech companies under their thumb rather than truly make the marketplace better.

There may be more coming. Robert Bork, Jr. wrote a scathing piece on Sen. Ted Cruz supporting the bill.

Klobuchar’s bill would also empower the state to go after social-media companies for dozens of vague infractions. Is there any doubt that the barons of Silicon Valley would be more alert than ever before to pleasing Washington’s progressive regulators, once they’re subject to being keelhauled by Washington at any time? At some point, as regulation blurs into ownership, the Klobuchar bill would treat these businesses as social properties to be politically managed.

The bill also stipulates that Big Tech companies must be fully “interoperable” and share their data with competitors. Under the current text, Chinese companies under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party would have full access not just to the proprietary hardware, software, systems, platforms, and infrastructure of Americans’ leading companies. They would also be able to freely lift the personal data of tens of millions of Americans. Despite an attempt to amend this glaring defect in Klobuchar’s bill, it was not fixed in committee.

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In the hearing, Senator Cruz made it clear that this bill would have to be amended to curb tech censorship before he would vote for it again.

Cruz can try, but it may come down to whether or not to vote for the bill, and based on what’s in it, he could be the next one off that train, leaving Klobuchar in more trouble than before.

That’s where everything stands right now. Klobuchar isn’t really interested in giving any of the Republicans any deference. She wants a win and she wants to pass this very problematic bill. In the process of trying to rally her own party, though, she is throwing away the bipartisan votes she needs. Just not the ones she deserves. Republicans, after all, shouldn’t be voting for this.