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Democrats have eagerly lined up behind Sen. Joe Manchin’s surprise climate change compromise, tucked inside the Inflation Reduction Act, despite warnings from some economic experts that the legislation would actually fuel inflation and burden the already gloomy economy.
After the Senate passed their signature climate, tax, and healthcare package Sunday, the action turns to the House. But for dozens of House Democrats, the measure’s uncertain economic impact is not their only risk in backing the bill.
The measure, which includes a host of tax increases, is once again highlighting failed pledges by many House Democrats representing pricey coastal areas to oppose any tax bill unless it also restores the federal income tax deduction for state and local taxes.
Dozens of House Democrats from California, New York, and New Jersey have spent years arguing that the limits on the state and local tax deduction, known as SALT, included in the 2017 Trump administration tax cut package amounted to a big tax increase on middle-class families in areas with either high real estate prices, high state and local taxes – or both.
Many of these same Democrats won their seats after launching aggressive attacks against Republicans for voting for the 2017 tax package that included a $10,000 limit on the SALT deduction.
When they arrived in Congress, these Democrats formed caucuses with the sole mission of repealing the cap, delivered salt bagels around the Capitol to keep the issue on lawmakers’ minds, and as recently as January threatened to block a revised version of the Build Back Better package, a top Biden priority, if it didn’t include the SALT cap repeal.
“We support the president’s agenda, and if there are any efforts that include a change in the tax code, then a SALT fix must be part of it. No SALT, no deal,” Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York said in a statement.
In the end, however, the Democrats caved to their leadership’s pressure and still voted in favor of several big spending bills that either jettisoned the SALT repeal in the final versions or failed to include it at all.
Last year, amid the Democrats’ big push to pass the Build Back Better and other infrastructure packages, California Democratic Reps. Katie Porter and Mike Levin, who represent adjacent coastal Southern California districts, repeatedly and forcefully argued for the SALT cap repeal.
“Today I stand with union leaders and my colleagues who are fighting to repeal the SALT cap,” Levin tweeted in June of last year. “More than 3 million families in CA making below $100,000 claimed the SALT deduction the year before the cap went into effect. Working families are being hurt, and it’s time to fix that.”
“We should crack down on the ultra-wealthy but not at the expense of families in high cost of living areas. Families need SALT relief,” Porter tweeted in a video last fall from her kitchen during consideration of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.
During her first campaign for Congress in 2018, Porter repeatedly assailed then-Rep. Mimi Walters, the Republican she toppled from the Orange County seat, for voting for the Trump tax package that included the new SALT limit.
“Make no mistake – by voting for Donald Trump’s tax scam, Mimi Walters sold Orange County families out and raised our taxes,” she tweeted just three days before the election. “That’s the wrong leadership for #CA45. Vote on Nov.
