Want to receive this newsletter every weekday? Subscribe to POLITICO Pro. You’ll also receive daily policy news and other intelligence you need to act on the day’s biggest stories. TAX PRIVACY: Given how section 6103 authority has proven to be such a politically powerful tool for partisan lawmakers who seek to discredit the front-runners in the 2024 presidential campaign, it’s not exactly a stretch to speculate that lawmakers could start turning to the authority more and more frequently to further their investigations of similarly powerful people. Indeed, take the recent controversy over gifts that billionaire Harlan Crow reportedly lavished on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over multiple decades: Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has repeatedly requested gift tax information from Crow and accused the billionaire of stonewalling his inquiries, but Wyden has also made it clear that he would consider all tools at the committee’s disposal to obtain Crow’s tax receipts. Those tools include authority to request private tax information under section 6103. Hypothetically, by using Crow's and Thomas' private tax returns Wyden would not only be able to see the full extent of the reported gifts and whether Crow considered the gifts to be "transfers of substantial value," but also whether Thomas listed his great nephew as a “dependent child” on his tax returns. As you may recall, a colleague for Thomas had argued that the justice did not need to report private school tuition payments Crow provided for Thomas’s great nephew on annual disclosure forms because a great nephew is not considered a “dependent child” under the Ethics in Government Act. That's all to say there are many, many ways in which both Republicans and Democrats could use 6103 to explore alleged ethics violations at the Supreme Court and other institutions going forward. THE LEGISLATIVE PURPOSE THRESHOLD: Technically, in order to use section 6103 authority, the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance committees need to justify the authority with some sort of "legislative purpose." Democrats, for instance, said that requesting and reviewing President Donald Trump’s tax returns was necessary to assess the functionality of and consider reforms to an IRS program that mandates audits of all sitting presidents and vice presidents. However, as George K. Yin of University of Virginia Law School wrote in a scholarly treatise on section 6103, the requirement that there be a legislative purpose for such inquiries is essentially unenforceable because legislators and their staff are granted absolute immunity from any prosecutions related to legislative acts by the Constitution's Speech or Debate clause. To prevent abuse of Congress’s powers to publish private taxpayer information, Yin suggests that Congress could enact an institutional waiver that waives tax-related inquiries from this immunity. Yin also proposes appointing a staff intermediary who could be the sole designated agent for reviewing private tax information. That intermediary would be in a position to help investigators by retrieving information deemed central to the legislative inquiry but also act as a backstop against politically motivated disclosures. However, the bottom line is this: Even though several lawmakers have said they are extremely reluctant to publish tax returns belonging to a private citizen in any scenario, we’re not hearing any calls for reforms to section 6103. At the same time, lawmakers are quickly learning that the tool can be an extraordinarily powerful and effective political cudgel that they can use to damage their opponents. And a quick notable update on the IRS allegations: You might have seen that Attorney General Merrick Garland insisted U.S. Attorney David Weiss had full authority to pursue charges against Hunter Biden, despite whistleblower claims that Weiss was denied requests to bring charges in California and Washington D.C., as well as a request for special counsel status. Well, on Friday the lawyers for one of the whistleblowers, IRS special agent Gary Shapley, issued a statement naming six witnesses to an October 6, 2022, meeting in which Weiss allegedly told prosecutors he did not in fact have authority to charge in those districts. We'll be keeping tabs on these developments. IRS CUTS: If you thought that the $21.2 billion IRS budget cut agreed to in the debt ceiling deal between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden was enough to satiate Republicans, you’re going to have to think again. As we reported last week, Republicans advanced appropriations legislation that includes a $10.2 billion rescission from Inflation Reduction Act funds for the agency in addition to a $1.2 billion cut (23 percent) from the IRS’s annual enforcement budget. “By slashing $1.2 billion from the IRS from their enforcement program… this legislation would benefit scammers, fraudsters, cheaters, billionaires, big corporations and those who are well-connected at the expense of hard-working Americans,” said House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.).
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