With Daniel Lippman

WARREN BILL TARGETS CORPORATE PROFITS: A trio of Democratic lawmakers on Monday introduced legislation targeting some of the country’s richest companies as a means of forcing the corporations to pay more in taxes while at the same time financing the party’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. The bill, from Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Angus King (I-Maine) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.), would levy a 7 percent tax on the annual income that companies report to investors, or their book income, over $100 million. It would target earnings that companies typically strive to maximize rather than what corporations report to the IRS, those played down in order to minimize their tax bills.

— In the one-pager on the bill, the sponsors framed the proposal as one of several needed reforms to the corporate tax code and a safeguard against companies’ “armies of lawyers, lobbyists, and accountants” dispatched “to bend the rules in their favor.” Warren, King and Beyer are calling for the proposal to be included as a pay-for for Democrats’ social spending plans that they are set to begin work on after passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill this morning.

— The lawmakers say that the plan would apply to around 1,300 companies and raise nearly $700 billion in revenue over a decade — but the bill, like any Democratic attempts to hike taxes on corporations to finance their policies, is sure to face stiff pushback from business lobbying groups.

— It’s also unclear whether moderate Democrats in the evenly divided Senate will go for the plan. Asked in an interview on MSNBC whether senators like Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) or Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) support the bill, Warren deflected, responding that King “has been notable as one of the moderates in the Senate,” and was part of the bipartisan group that helped craft the bipartisan infrastructure framework.

— The Massachusetts Democrat, of course, made calls for a wealth tax a centerpiece of her presidential campaign, and has sparred with companies over their federal tax bills previously. In the one-pager on the bill, Warren singled out Amazon, which, according to the left-leaning Institution on Taxation and Economic Policy, paid an effective tax rate of 4.3 percent on its last three years of profits.

Good afternoon and welcome to PI. Slow news day, huh? Send lobbying tips: [email protected]. And be sure to follow me on Twitter: @caitlinoprysko.

CRYPTO FIGHT PIVOTS TO THE HOUSE: “A bipartisan group of House lawmakers on Monday began rallying support to scale back cryptocurrency tax rules in the Senate infrastructure bill, suggesting the knock-down, drag-out fight over the proposal might not be over,” POLITICO’s Victoria Guida reports.

— “The co-chairs of the Blockchain Caucus — Reps. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), Darren Soto (D-Fla.), David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) and Bill Foster (D-Ill.) — said in a letter to colleagues that language requiring crypto transactions to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service ‘will have sweeping implications for crypto innovators in our country and further regulate innovation out of the United States.’ They also cited concerns that the rules may ‘impinge on Americans' privacy rights’” and urged that the House version of the bill “clearly exempt noncustodial blockchain intermediaries and ensure that civil liberties are protected.”

RETAILERS FILE AMICUS BRIEF IN CHINA TARIFF SUITS: Half a dozen retail trade associations filed an amicus brief Monday with the U.S. Court of International Trade in solidarity with more than 6,000 plaintiffs who sued last September over the Trump administration’s tariffs on goods from China, claiming the penalties are unlawful. Those tariffs, which the Trump administration imposed on more than $350 billion worth of Chinese goods, remain in place while the Biden administration reviews current U.S. trade policy toward Beijing, and industry has begun to get impatient over the lack of a resolution.

— Monday’s amicus brief, filed on behalf of the National Retail Federation, the Retail Industry Leaders Association’s Retail Litigation Center, the American Apparel & Footwear Association, the Consumer Technology Association, the Footwear Distributors and Retailers of America, the Juvenile Products Manufacturers Association and the Toy Association, echoes the thousands of plaintiffs who accuse USTR of imposing the tariffs “without connecting them to the underlying investigation of China’s trade practices” as required by law. The plaintiffs also accused the administration of failing to give adequate opportunity to and consideration of public comments before finalizing the tariffs, which the amicus brief asserts “implicated hundreds of billions of dollars of imports and impacted almost every facet of the U.S. economy” and upended supply-chain planning by members of the trade groups.

— “If USTR had satisfied its obligation to allow for meaningful comments from amici and others and had actually considered them, it would have recognized the considerable harm its actions would inflict,” the groups write in the brief. “The tariffs are a hidden tax on U.S. consumers, hurting domestic producers, retailers, and customers alike. And, as predicted, they have had a significant adverse impact on the U.S. economy.”

INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE-FACEBOOK BEEF: President Joe Biden’s walked-back outburst last month accusing Facebook of “killing people” with its inability to keep coronavirus vaccine misinformation off its platform “was the culmination of increasingly combative meetings with the company about the spread of misinformation,” administration officials, Facebook employees and others told The New York Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Cecilia Kang. Discussions with Biden officials and the social media giant about the proliferation of conspiracy theories and other falsehoods about the vaccines began before Biden was sworn into office.

— “The meetings have involved the top ranks on both sides, according to the people, including those close to Facebook and those with ties to the administration, who would only speak anonymously because the conversations were private. In March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, called Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, and discussed health misinformation. The White House grew so frustrated by Facebook’s answers in the internal meetings that at one point it demanded to hear from the data scientists at the company instead of lobbyists.”

— Toward the end of the transition, Kanno-Youngs and Kang write, DJ Patil, the transition’s chief technology officer, “asked to meet with more members of Facebook’s data science team, not lobbyists without technical backgrounds, to drill into details about where misinformation originates on the site and how prevalent it becomes through shares. Facebook said [Kang-Xing] Jin, an engineer who leads the company’s health efforts, had attended many of the meetings.”

HOW AN INSURANCE GIANT SHAPED GROUNDBREAKING SURPRISE-BILLING STUDY: “In 2016, an academic study from some of the most respected scholars in health care economics prompted a national outcry. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Yale University researchers, found that 22 percent of the time someone goes to an emergency room in a hospital covered by their insurance, they still receive costly bills after being treated by an out-of-network doctor,” a practice known as surprise billing, which lawmakers sought to ban in hard-fought (and heavily lobbied) legislation last December, a push sparked partly by the Yale study.

— “The research was based on data from more than 2 million claims provided by UnitedHealthcare, the largest private health insurance company in the United States, under a data sharing agreement with Yale,” The Intercept’s Rose Adams reports. Though United was not named in the study, “internal emails between executives at UnitedHealthcare provided to The Intercept reveal that the insurance giant provided its data while working behind the scenes to influence the paper and a 2017 follow-up — not necessarily their statistical conclusions, but their narrative framing. The latter paper portrays private equity-run hospital staffing companies, which are perpetually at odds with insurers over physician compensation, in a negative light for using surprise billing as a negotiating tool to hike up in-network rates.”

— Mac Thornberry has joined the RAND Corporation, a federally funded defense think tank, as an adjunct senior fellow, Morning Defense reports. He is the former chair of the House Armed Services Committee and a senior adviser to space startup Hawkeye 360. He recently told Morning Defense he has no plans to register as a lobbyist when his one-year cooling-off period ends in January.

— Nichole Dotson-Olajuwon is now director of diversity, equity and inclusion at Holland & Knight. She most recently was chief diversity officer at Thompson & Knight.

— Laszlo Baksay is now director at DCI Group. Baksay is the third recent hire in the firm’s beefed up digital media shop. He was previously a strategist at the Pentagon and is an FP1 Strategies alum.

— Pranay Udutha is now director of strategic initiatives and corporate development at QuantumScape. He previously led strategy and operations at ARPA-E and is a Trump White House and Bill Cassidy alum.

— Ryanne Brown and Savi Krishnan are joining Priorities USA. Brown will be digital paid media director and previously was managing director of digital advertising at Do Big Things. Krishnan will be competitive media analytics manager and previously was a data associate at GMMB.

— Caitlin Buchanan is now a policy adviser to Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.). She most recently was congressional affairs manager at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and is a House Science alum.

None.

TCRB (Trumbull County Resurrection Blueprint) (Hybrid PAC)

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