‘No Way to Run a Two-Car Parade Let Alone the House’

The boiling internal GOP debate that’s holding up President Donald Trump’s self-declared “big, beautiful” bill isn’t over the deductibility of state and local taxes — it’s about the class and geographic divide splintering today’s Republican Party.

And more directly, it’s about two midterm elections: Trump’s first, in 2018, when a series of Republicans from affluent districts retired or lost, and his second, next year’s election when many of the lawmakers elected from upscale suburbia ever since are facing difficult re-elections.

From the moment the president signed his 2017 tax legislation, which limited so-called SALT deductions at $10,000, congressional Republicans from high-income districts have been vowing to raise the cap. And now a handful are angry, and more than a little perplexed, that the initial House draft of the bill renewing those Trump tax cuts doesn’t do more to address what’s a central concern for their districts: the double-taxing of the large swath of their income that goes to state income taxes, property taxes, sewer taxes, personal-property levies and the like.

But these lawmakers, who are overwhelmingly from the two coasts, shouldn’t be surprised. Just as that great sage of our times, John Edwards, once spoke about Two Americas, the GOP is bifurcated. Our tribal silos, it turns out, also exist within the same parties.

The bulk of Trump-era congressional Republicans represent red states with lower incomes and more modest tax bills than their outnumbered counterparts in blue America.

The only Republican left from New England in today’s Congress is Maine’s Sen. Susan Collins, and West Coast states haven’t elected a GOP senator for over two decades, while mostly electing GOP House members from more rural and less well-educated inland districts.

Fittingly, the author of the initial tax bill that the blue-state Republicans are so, well, salty about hails from a district that culturally couldn’t be much further from Westchester County, New York, and Orange County, California: Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith represents the bootheel and the rest of Southeast Missouri.

Smith, who proudly notes he grew up in a trailer park and recently recalled taking his mother to Cracker Barrel, unveiled the bill this week as a reflection of the GOP’s realignment as a working-class party. Now, that ignores the many measures — looking at you, lobbyists who kept in the carried-interest benefit — that help high earners.

Yet by giving his blue-state House colleagues so little to take back to their districts, Smith has exposed the raw class fissures in the House GOP.

“They have a very myopic view of New York and California,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said about Smith and some other red-state Republicans.

Lawler and a small group of other Republican lawmakers from New Jersey, New York and California, nearly all of them elected since 2020, have banded together to demand a higher SALT cap. Implicit in their demand: Without relief, they will suffer the same fate at the ballot box next year that so many suburban House Republicans did in 2018, and, same as then, there goes the GOP majority.

Few in these Republican ranks have been so vocal about trying to expose their red-state colleagues to the blue America districts they represent than Lawler. The 38-year-old New Yorker, first elected in 2022, holds a seat hugging either side of the Hudson above White Plains and stretching over to the Connecticut border. This is Chappaqua, not Cracker Barrel.

The median income in Lawler’s district is about $119,000, and half of his constituents have college degrees (In Smith’s Missouri seat, the average income is $60,000, and only 22 percent of his voters have degrees). Lawler won re-election last year with 52.2 percent of the vote.

I spoke with Lawler Thursday morning, as he headed to a meeting in the Capitol with House Speaker Mike Johnson aimed at reaching an agreement on the SALT debate.

The New Yorker knows he’s outnumbered in his caucus, but what, understandably, gnaws on him is why his colleagues can’t grasp that without competitive seats such as his, the Republicans will be back in the minority.

“In the districts that determine the control of Congress — because there’s really only about 35 districts that are actually competitive — the fact is that it’s districts like mine that determine that outcome,” Lawler told me.

Lawler absolves Johnson, who himself represents rural North Louisiana, noting that the speaker has learned about the other America from his travels around the country since taking over the House GOP. But he does not spare Smith, arguing that the Missourian doesn’t grasp that it’s his colleagues’ victories in blue America that have handed him perhaps the most coveted gavel in all of Congress.

“No, I don’t think Jason does, frankly,” said Lawler, noting that Smith will “talk about how he has the lowest SALT district in the country.”

And that’s about the opposite of New York’s 17th District.

Every time Lawler returns home, it’s the cost of living he hears most about. Here’s a taste why: Three of the four counties he represents have some of the highest property taxes in the country; the average home price soared from $700,000 to $1.1 million in Westchester County over just four years; and mortgage costs in the same period there went up about a thousand dollars a month because of higher interest rates.

“People aren’t leaving New York because of the weather, they’re not leaving New York because of the topography, they’re leaving New York because of the cost of living,” said Lawler.

Which gets to a very personal element of this debate for the young congressman: He thinks reaching a better deal on SALT could give him a big accomplishment to run on, whether it’s for re-election or for governor of New York next year.

“It’s an important issue for New Yorkers, and it certainly matters in the context of deciding whether or not there’s a pathway [for governor],” Lawler told me. “If we deliver on this, this is a big win for New York.”

The political salience is why, he added, Smith and Johnson never should have let a bill come out of Ways and Means without doing more to address SALT. The initial draft of the House bill only lifts the cap to $30,000.

“They were trying to jam us with a number in the hopes that they would just say, ‘This is the number and you got to take it,’ ” said Lawler, adding, bitingly, “And from my vantage point that’s no way to run a two-car parade let alone the House of Representatives.”

Of course, Smith and House GOP leaders may have thought they could jam the SALT caucus because, well, such moderate Republicans have a history of capitulating on final passage with most major bills.

Lawler, though, said he’s not worried about losing his seat over the issue because he insists the eventual bill will do more on SALT. And, he notes, his wing of the party has an ally in a president who has spent much of his adult life in one of the highest tax domiciles in America, a midtown Manhattan high-rise.

It's the great irony of this moment, the red state Republicans who lead the party in Congress are besotted with a president who knows from SALT.

“He agrees with us about the need to lift the cap,” Lawler said of Trump, recalling with detail his three in-person conversations with the president on the matter in the first three months of the year.

Getting closer to the bone, and perhaps screwing up his courage before going to see the speaker, Lawler addressed one of his loudest intra-party critics, who represents a heavily rural North Georgia district.

“The fact is somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene is replaceable,” he said. “We will win her seat without a problem if she’s not the candidate. In seats like mine, that’s not the case. And so when she says stupid things like, ‘We don’t need RINOs,’ really? You have no ability to deliver on the president’s agenda if you don’t hold these seats.”

Lawler knows, though, that his ultimate leverage on SALT may owe to a different sort of formula: House Republicans may speak with a Southern accent, but it’s the Yankees who have strength in numbers, given the party’s slender majority.

“Unlike in 2017, where the Republicans had a big majority that could allow them to disregard the opinions of people like me and pass a bill that capped SALT at $10,000, they can’t do that this time,” he said.