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Presented by the Tax Foundation: Delivered daily, Influence gives you a comprehensive rundown and analysis of all lobby hires and news on K Street. | | | | | |  | | By Caitlin Oprysko | Presented by the Tax Foundation | With Daniel Lippman PROGRAMMING NOTE: Influence will not publish from Monday Aug. 30-Monday Sept. 6. We'll be back on our normal schedule on Tuesday Sept. 7. ESCAPE ROOMS BAND TOGETHER TO PUSH FOR INCLUSION IN VENUE RELIEF PROGRAM: America’s escape rooms, battered by the Covid-19 pandemic and seeking inclusion in the Small Business Administration’s grant program for shuttered venues, turned to K Street last month in order to help make their case, newly filed lobbying disclosures show. ERGO, a new trade organization representing U.S. escape room operators, retained Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies’ Towner French back in July to help the group fight for eligibility in the troubled relief program after the group’s president says SBA determined the industry didn’t qualify for the grants. — The president, Andrew Preble, owns Escape My Room in New Orleans said in an interview that with the rise in coronavirus cases thanks to the highly transmissible Delta variant that has especially impacted his home state, business is down to about a quarter of what it was pre-pandemic. He said around 20 escape rooms have successfully applied for a shuttered venue operator grant, while he estimated another 20 had been denied even after appeals. — When looking at the program’s eligibility requirements, he argued, “every kind of weird technical thing in there that was meant to exclude people, for the most part, escape rooms qualified for” — things like selling tickets in advance, marketing a certain number of events per year and using certain technical equipment. He believes the industry had missed out because SBA tried to define “performing arts,” though Preble argued that shouldn’t exclude escape rooms, comparing them to a type of theater, “although we don't market ourselves as that.” At his company, he said, “we do hire actors,” who then read off a copyrighted script. — Apart from trying to win Covid relief, the industry is just looking to gain a foothold on Capitol Hill, Preble said. “Escape rooms are such a misunderstood sort of business that we felt like it was necessary to kind of get in front of the conversation… on the federal level, and just kind of explain to people who we are,” he said. Happy Friday and welcome to PI . PI will be off all next week, through Labor Day, but keep sending those K Street tips and gossip and we’ll see you in September: coprysko@politico.com. Be sure to follow me on Twitter: @caitlinoprysko. | | A message from the Tax Foundation: How you pay for it matters. While Washington debates the best ways to fund an historic infrastructure investment, one little-known pay-for is flying under the radar. GILTI is a Republican-passed policy that President Biden has proposed doubling down on. The only problem: it doesn’t work as advertised. Learn more about GILTI, a foreign tax with a local impact. | | | MORE NEW BUSINESS: Anheuser-Busch Companies has hired Amy Jensen Cunniffe of SplitOak Strategies to lobby on issues relating to the differentiation between beer and cannabis, according to disclosure filings. Although the brewer retains around a half dozen outside lobbying firms, only one, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, has previously lobbied on cannabis issues for the so-called king of beers, apart from the company’s in-house lobbyists, disclosure filings show. Anheuser-Busch is not the first alcohol company to lobby on marijuana issues. — Constellation Brands, the company behind alcohol brands like Corona, Modelo, SVEDKA and Robert Mondavi, recently added a new vice president to its government relations team to serve as its lead on cannabis policy issues. Alcohol and tobacco brands have increasingly become players in helping shape marijuana policy, and Constellation owns a nearly 39 percent stake in major Canadian cannabis firm Canopy Growth. — The U.S. subsidiary of Dutch chipmaker ASML reported hiring its second new outside firm this summer — a team of eight lobbyists from Ogilvy Government Relations that includes former top aides to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). Ogilvy will lobby on behalf of the semiconductor giant on “issues related to the global chip shortage impact on the semiconductor industry,” trade and bills like the CHIPS Act and a China competition package. — The company also recently disclosed that it had hired PutalaStrategies’ Chris Putala, a former aide to President Joe Biden, to lobby on similar issues. And earlier this summer ASML registered a team of in-house lobbyists for its U.S. subsidiary for the first time. — Restaurant Brands International, the parent company of Burger King, Tim Hortons and Popeyes, has picked up a new outside lobbying firm too. RBI hired Tom Quinn, José Fuentes and Neil Ohlhausen of LSN Partners to lobby on corporate tax issues and labor issues, according to disclosure filings. INSURANCE, DENTAL LOBBIES PUSH TO PARE BACK MEDICARE EXPANSION: “Congressional Democrats’ push to add dental, vision and hearing coverage to Medicare is running into resistance from powerful health industry lobbies,” POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein reports. It’s “an early sign of the battles facing lawmakers when they return to debate a $3.5 trillion social spending package.” — Progressives’ desired reforms “threaten the bottom line of insurers who administer private Medicare plans and sell supplemental coverage for dental, vision and hearing services. Groups like the American Dental Association, worried their members will be paid less in traditional Medicare than in private Medicare plans, are also pushing to limit the new benefits to the poorest Americans.” — And so “House and Senate committees now assembling the package are weighing options like a longer phase-in of benefits, skimpier coverage with more cost-sharing or even means-testing that would restrict new benefits to only the poorest beneficiaries.” — An insurance industry source tells Alice lawmakers’ “deliberations are ‘freaking out’ companies who worry that seniors will drop their private plans en masse and migrate to traditional Medicare once the new benefits are in place. But the source said the industry is mindful of the optics of publicly opposing coverage of eyeglasses, dental care and hearing aids, and is largely lobbying behind the scenes.” On the other side, “AARP is also lobbying for as generous a benefit as possible, warning of a political backlash should it take too many years to kick in or cover too few services.” TIME’S UP FOR TINA TCHEN: “Tina Tchen, the president and CEO of Time’s Up, told her staff Thursday that she will resign, less than a day after she admitted that her organization’s private consultations with then-New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo during his sexual harassment scandal were more extensive than previously known,” Michael Scherer and Josh Dawsey report in The Washington Post. — “A former Chicago corporate lawyer who became first lady Michelle Obama ’s chief of staff, Tchen has led the advocacy group focused on fighting workplace sexual misconduct since 2019. She co-founded the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund with the attorney Roberta Kaplan, who resigned this month after New York Attorney General Letitia James uncovered some of her consultations with Cuomo advisers about the governor’s response to his first sexual harassment accuser, Lindsey Boylan . Tchen also co-founded with Kaplan a private consulting company, HABIT Advisors, which focused on advising companies about how to handle sexual harassment. The website for that firm was taken offline in recent weeks.” — Tchen’s resignation came a day after the Post reported that “Kaplan spoke with [top Cuomo aide Melissa] DeRosa about Cuomo’s first response to Boylan’s allegations, and relayed those conversations to Tchen. Tchen also launched a separate effort at the time to get Cuomo to launch a review of his workplace culture. She also decided against releasing a planned statement supporting Boylan after objections from the organization.” ANOTHER DOMINO FALLS: “The National Women’s Law Center announced on Friday that the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund would end its contract with public relations firm SKDK — a move that puts more distance between the Legal Defense Fund and Time’s Up,” The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor, Arya Sundaram and Melena Ryzik report. “SKDK currently manages the defense fund’s program that matches harassment and assault survivors with public relations professionals. The law center will soon take over that responsibility. In a statement, the law center said it made the decision ‘to ensure that the independence of our work is clear to the survivors we serve.’ The decision follows revelations about the Time’s Up board member and SKDK managing director Hilary Rosen’s involvement in the group’s response to the first Cuomo allegations.” | | | |   | | | | | | — Alex Ricci is now the director of government affairs at the Education Finance Council, per Huddle. He was previously a speechwriter for the House Committee on Education and Labor. — Advancing American Freedom, the 501(c)(4) group run by former Vice President Mike Pence, has hired John Fogarty as its new director of development and strategy, per Playbook. He was previously senior vice president of development at the Heritage Foundation and is a Koch Network alum. — Jessica Hart Steinmann is now deputy general counsel and senior adviser for election integrity for the America First Policy Institute. She previously was elections committee senior counsel in the Texas House of Representatives, and is a DOJ and Ted Cruz alum. — Kelly Wismer will be chief of staff to the executive director at the Appalachian Regional Commission. She was most recently legislative director for broadband at the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. — Arnold & Porter is bringing on Judah Prero, former assistant general counsel at the American Chemistry Council, to the firm’s environmental practice as counsel. | | | None. | | | BATTLE BORN VALUES PAC (Super PAC)
ENERGY DRIVES AMERICA PAC (Super PAC)
Equity PAC (Hybrid PAC) | | New Lobbying Registrations | | Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, Pc: California Intercity Rail Corridors Lifting Everyone
Coupang, Inc.: Coupang, Inc.
Cozen O'Connor Public Strategies: Ergo A Nonprofit Corporation
Hobart Hallaway & Quayle Ventures, LLC: Bailey & Glasser LLP On Behalf Of Caliber Midstream Holdings, Lp
Ikon Public Affairs: American Future Systems
J Phillip Gingrey Md, LLC: Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath On Behalf Of Boston Childrens Hospital
Kilpatrick Townsend Stockton LLP: Ecostrat USa Inc.
Lobbyit.Com: International Relief & Human Rights Initiative
Lobbyit.Com: The Institute For Ngo Research
Lot Sixteen LLC: National Ocean Industries Association
Lot Sixteen LLC: The Whiskey Project Group
Lsn Partners, LLC: National Council On Civil Advocacy
Lsn Partners, LLC: Restaurant Brands International Dba Rbi
Mccaulley&Company: Murtis Taylor Human Services System
Monument Advocacy: Atlassian
Ogilvy Government Relations: Asml US, LLC
Splitoak Strategies LLC: Anheuser-Busch Companies
Tact Consulting, LLC: Empire Education Corporation | | New Lobbying Terminations | | Forbes-Tate: United Airlines, Inc.
Intervistas Consulting, Inc.: Aeroports De Montreal
Intervistas Consulting, Inc.: Vancouver International Airport Authority
Lobbyit.Com: Patriot Angels
The Manning Group, LLC: Mothers Against Drunk Driving
The Manning Group, LLC: Safe Kids Worldwide | | A message from the Tax Foundation: Competing in today’s global economy. Many U.S. businesses must operate in countries across the globe to compete internationally. When U.S. companies succeed abroad, it means more investment and jobs back home: Two-thirds of employees for U.S. multinational companies are based in America.
How you finance infrastructure matters. President Biden has proposed doubling the tax rate on GILTI, a little-known policy passed by Republicans in 2017 to discourage U.S. businesses from shifting profits from IP overseas.
GILTI is poorly designed. It doesn’t just tax IP, and it doesn’t just tax businesses that are looking to shift their profits into low-tax countries. GILTI unintentionally places a surtax on many U.S. companies that want to reach customers overseas.
Making bad policy worse. Whatever its intentions, GILTI is a flawed policy, and doubling down on it now will hurt us abroad, and at home.
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