The coalition of blue-state House Republicans who spent the last four months demanding a larger state and local tax deduction appear to be done fighting for their cause.
Just days ago, these blue-state Republican lawmakers were threatening to tank the bill over their displeasure with the Senate’s compromise for the tax deduction: a $40,000 SALT deduction for five years, followed by a $10,000 maximum deduction for the following five years.
“We’re going to fight our way out,” Rep. Nick LaLota, a New York Republican, told reporters last week.
Fighting their way out, it turns out, has so far meant praising the bill — including the Senate’s SALT provision, valued at significantly less than the $40,000-for-10-years agreement that LaLota and other caucus members struck with House GOP leadership in May.
“My team and I are reviewing all 887 pages of the Senate bill,” LaLota said in a social media post Tuesday. “Early analysis: middle-class Long Island families could see a $6K+ fed’l tax cut next year—$5K from the higher $40K SALT deduction.”
By Wednesday, as their more conservative counterparts held out for hours on supporting a series of procedural votes on the legislation, the SALT-focused members were more often praising the bill than not.
“We were able to secure a $40,000 cap, which is 4x the current $10,000 and a massive tax cut for hardworking and middle-class families across this country but especially in New York,” Rep. Mike Lawler said Wednesday on NPR. “Failure here will result in the largest tax increase in American history and it would be a disaster for the economy.”
Lawler also said a week ago that he would not support any framework that strayed from the deal the caucus struck with House GOP leadership in May, which would have offered a $40,000 maximum deduction for 10 years for people making under $500,000 a year.
“The deal that was negotiated in the House is the deal,” Lawler told NOTUS a few days ago.
The group of New York, New Jersey and California members’ apparent decision to accept the Senate’s SALT proposal is key to pushing the GOP’s tax bill over the finish line, narrowing the number of lawmakers that pose a barrier to its passage.
As recently as the end of last week, Lawler and his fellow SALT holdouts made up a contingent that could have caused the bill’s failure themselves.
Lawler’s comments over the weekend that the watered-down Senate compromise was actually a “win” and a standard part of the negotiating process were something of a surprise.
So was the fact that conversations Wednesday in the Capitol about holdouts had entirely moved past SALT Caucus members. Even the lingering conversations around SALT were centered less around the moderate Republicans and more around House Freedom Caucus members, who held out for hours on multiple procedural votes on the legislation and cited the SALT deal as a “gimmick” that was among their biggest fiscal concerns with the bill.
Ultimately, Tuesday’s bill passage in the Senate, where several once-concerned senators changed course to deliver for President Donald Trump and Senate GOP leaders, offered a clue into how the SALT chips would fall.
So did the White House’s involvement in talks.
Lawler was also among a group of lawmakers who met with the president Wednesday morning at the White House, though members who spoke to reporters after returning to the Capitol on Wednesday said the meetings were primarily about Medicaid concerns and did not mention SALT.
And though SALT Caucus members insisted to NOTUS last week that pressure from Trumpworld wouldn’t change their minds, Lawler thanked Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for their role in SALT negotiations over the weekend and said Wednesday that “the president obviously wants to get the bill passed.”
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Shifra Dayak is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.