This week and next, parents who have lost children due to online harms are descending on Washington to lobby House members to pass the Kids Online Safety Act.

“Every year they choose not to act, they will be complicit,” said Christine McComas, a Maryland mother who lost her daughter to cyberbullying twelve years ago and member of parent advocacy group ParentsTogether.

On Thursday, McComas and other members of ParentsTogether hand-delivered letters signed by 100,000 parents to House members urging them to advance KOSA. The concerned parents met with House Speaker Mike Johnson’s office, as well as 21 other representatives on both sides of the aisle. Parents affiliated with children’s advocacy organization FairPlay also plan to meet with legislators next week.

Senators voted 91-3 in July to pass the bill, which would make companies responsible for the ill effects of design features that recommend content and encourage engagement. The Senate paired KOSA with the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, also known as COPPA 2.0, which would minimize the amount of data companies can collect on minors and prohibit targeting them with advertising.

Now, with just two weeks left before House lawmakers leave Washington until after the November election, pressure is building on the lower chamber to advance its own version of both bills. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), one of the lead sponsors of the Senate bill, has been shoring up support among conservatives.

A growing concern: Politicians and policymakers in both parties are increasingly worried that social media sites are harming teens’ mental health.

In June, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for tobacco-style warning labels on online platforms. And earlier this week, a bipartisan group of attorneys general from 42 states and territories backed that recommendation and called on Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to pass legislation that would require tech platforms to post warnings that their sites endanger kids’ mental health.

Neither KOSA nor COPPA 2.0 would require platforms to append warning labels to their sites. But the passage of either or both bills would be a rare step toward regulating social media platforms. At the moment, the companies are largely immune from legal scrutiny over the impact of their products due to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a 1996 law that protects them from getting sued for problems arising from user-posted content.

Breaking the logjam: With vanishingly few legislative days left this Congress, the rush to pass KOSA and COPPA 2.0 could go down to the wire. Even if the House passes one or both bills before November, lawmakers will still need to coordinate with the Senate to send the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk before a new Congress (and president) take the reins in January.

Some House members had hoped to advance KOSA and COPPA 2.0 as part of a broader effort to pass comprehensive data privacy legislation this year. “If you have a national privacy bill, we incorporate a lot of the things that relate to kids and make children’s privacy a priority,” House Energy and Commerce ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) told POLITICO reporter Robert King on Wednesday.

But House E&C leadership canceled a June mark-up of the comprehensive American Privacy Rights Act amid pushback from conservatives — scuttling a key chance for KOSA and COPPA 2.0, which were also slated to be marked up.

Despite those setbacks, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), KOSA’s lead sponsor, said House leadership is committed to getting it across the finish line.

“The speaker’s office is engaged, the majority leader’s office is engaged,” Bilirakis told King on Tuesday. “We are going to try to get this worked out very, very soon.”

What’s next: The House Energy and Commerce Committee has an opportunity to mark up KOSA at a markup planned for next week, a committee staffer told Ruth on Wednesday. So far the bill has 47 cosponsors, evenly split across the two parties.