Congress
Mar-a-Lago meetings to include an offer on SALT cap
The incoming Trump administration plans to offer an expansion of the state and local tax deduction to Republican lawmakers from New York, New Jersey and California who are heading to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday for a sit-down with the president-elect.
While exact details weren’t available, one proposal being discussed would allow married couples to deduct $20,000 of their state and local taxes from their federal income taxes. Under current law, married couples can deduct only $10,000, which is the same for single taxpayers.
In return, the so-called SALT Republicans will be expected to fall in line behind a sweeping tax bill the GOP hopes to enact later this year, two sources familiar with the new administration’s thinking told Blue Light News, who were granted anonymity to discuss the internal strategizing.
The lawmakers — who represent politically competitive, high-tax districts where constituents have been dinged by the SALT cap — haven’t ruled out pushing for other changes, though.
The talks will be just one part of a broader set of discussions President-elect Donald Trump plans to hold in Florida this weekend that will also include members of the House Freedom Caucus and the chairs of important House committees.
However, the outcome of the conversations with SALT Republicans promises to be particularly important for the GOP’s plans to pass an extension of expiring provisions of the tax cuts enacted during Trump’s first administration.
Members of the coalition stalled tax legislation in the 118th Congress several times over their demands for SALT relief, which is otherwise widely unpopular in the Republican conference. And, in the GOP’s slim two-seat majority, the group now wields tremendous leverage again — and House leadership knows it.
The issue “will definitely come up. I think that’s a big sticking point for the members that will be there,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.), who is part of the SALT caucus and also a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee.
Malliotakis said that New York Republicans would be meeting on Wednesday to go over their strategy ahead of the meetings in Florida.
“We’re going to go over the impact SALT has had in each of our districts, how many people take SALT versus the standard deduction, what are the income levels that are affected,” said Malliotakis.
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) confirmed to Blue Light News on Tuesday that he would also be part of the group of lawmakers making the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago.
We’re going to “have broad discussions but obviously SALT will be part of it,” Lawler said.
It’s possible that the group will push for something more than doubling the deduction for married couples, which the lawmakers call a “marriage penalty.” The New Yorkers are quick to point out that Trump himself pledged at a campaign rally in Long Island to expand SALT relief — and that the blue districts they represent are some of the most competitive in the country.
Former New York Republican Rep. Marc Molinaro, who lost his reelection last year, told Blue Light News in December that voters might have returned him to Congress if Republicans had achieved something on SALT.
“I think the logical way to do it is to, at a minimum, double it and get rid of the marriage penalty elements of it,” said Molinaro. “What I would say is that’s the floor, I think, from a constituent’s perspective, from a voter’s perspective.”
Malliotakis said that changes in the alternative minimum taxes for upper-income taxpayers, which would further erode the value of the SALT deduction and were repealed in 2017, “cannot come back.”
“That’s a red line for me,” she said.
House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who will lead the charge on tax policies this year, has acknowledged Trump’s desire to address the SALT cap. Yet, Smith has also asserted that Republicans cannot fully repeal the limit, which they put in place in 2017 to help pay for their Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.
The non-partisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated in 2021 that a full repeal of the cap would cost $900 billion.
“That’s how [Trump] does things differently,” Smith told Blue Light News, referring to the meetings scheduled for Mar-a-Lago. “He’s going to have all the committee chairmen down there on Saturday, too, the Freedom Caucus, so being there to listen to him.”
The House Ethics Committee will go forward with its plans to hold a rare public trial next week for Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick.
The beleaguered Florida Democrat faces allegations that she stole millions in FEMA funding and is also in the midst of a federal criminal case on the charges. She had previously asked to pause the proceedings before the Ethics Committee pending the matter in federal court, and the panel already postponed its scheduled hearing once after a Cherfilus-McCormick said she lost her legal representation.
But the bipartisan Ethics Committee announced Wednesday that the adjudicatory subcommittee handling Cherfilus-McCormick’s case had ultimately voted to reject the latest delay request. It also rejected a motion to hold the hearing “in executive session,” as opposed to the public hearing.
“The matter of Representative Cherfilus-McCormick has been before the Committee since September 2023,” said the statement from House Ethics Committee leadership. “Further delay of the matter would not serve the interests of justice.
“Moreover,” the statement continued, “holding the entire hearing in executive session at this phase of the proceedings would depart from Committee precedent, limit public transparency around these serious allegations, and do nothing to safeguard the House’s integrity.”
The hearing will begin at 2 p.m. March 26.
Lawmakers rejected legislation Wednesday to compel the United States to maintain a balanced budget, a perennial pursuit of fiscal conservatives that stood little chance of becoming the law of the land.
The House voted 211-207 against the resolution that would have launched an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution to bar the federal government from running a deficit. It needed to clear each chamber of Congress by a two-thirds vote, then be ratified by three-fourths of all the states.
But the measure’s consideration had major symbolic meaning for budget hawks like its sponsor, Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.).
“Many of us have been agitating for years to do a balanced budget amendment and out of the blue, they said, ‘we’re ready to do it,’” Biggs said in an interview Tuesday, referring to House GOP leaders.
“They didn’t ask me to do anything, didn’t offer anything,” he said of whether leaders scheduled the vote in an effort to court Biggs, who has in the past threatened to tank spending bills for where he hasn’t liked the price tag. “Just out of the blue, I got a call.”
A spokesperson for Speaker Mike Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the timing of the measure’s consideration.
Various balanced budget amendment proposals have been offered more than a hundred times since 1999, but peaked in the 1970s and 1980s. The Pew Research Center found that balancing the budget is the single most popular subject of constitutional amendment proposals since 1999, according to analysis of legislative data from the Library of Congress.
Biggs’ latest resolution stated that “total expenditures for a year shall not exceed the average annual receipts collected in the three prior years,” adjusted for inflation and changes in the population.
It would have made an exception for war, where “specific expenditures in excess of the limit” can be approved by Congress “for any year in which a declaration of war is in effect.” Modern wars after World War II have largely been funded by debt; none of them, including the decades-long Global War on Terror, were never backed up by an official declaration of war.
The Biggs measure also would have instituted a two-thirds majority vote threshold in both chambers as necessary to approve any new tax or increase the tax rate. The GOP megabill passed last summer, which included significant tax cuts, passed the Senate in a simple majority vote through the filibuster-skirting budget reconciliation process.
Rep. Kevin Kiley, the former Republican who recently registered as an Independent, said in an interview Wednesday he plans to caucus with the House GOP and will seek to regain his committee assignments.
The California lawmaker was formally removed from his panels Wednesday after giving official notice he was switching parties to serve as an Independent and run in a new district after his state redrew congressional maps.
The House GOP Steering Committee will need to approve Kiley’s effort to take back his seats on Education and the Workforce, Transportation and Infrastructure and Judiciary. Kiley told reporters this was “completely expected” and that he looked “forward to being reappointed as an Independent.”
Mia McCarthy contributed to this report.
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