Representative George Santos has had a onerous time making new pals or profitable improve in his first few months in Congress — an comprehensible end result, in all probability, given the post-election revelations that he lied about a lot of his background.
On Tuesday, Mr. Santos attempted a new tactic: He presented his first invoice, searching for to partly undo President Donald J. Trump’s tax plan that restricted how a lot householders may deduct in state and native belongings taxes.
The invoice puts Mr. Santos, a Republican of New York, at odds with some in his personal birthday celebration. But Mr. Santos isn’t precisely some of the birthday celebration’s favorites, and he gave the impression extra in currying choose along with his constituents, whose excessive belongings taxes cause them to disproportionately suffering from the bounds to the so-called SALT deduction.
“Raising the cap on SALT will provide real tax relief not just to New York’s Third Congressional District but to all,” Mr. Santos mentioned in a remark launched by means of his workplace on Tuesday.
The invoice is the most recent indication of Mr. Santos’s dedication to press on as a congressman, hoping to rehabilitate his public personality whilst staving off requires his resignation, whilst recent polling has shown that he’s considered unfavorably by means of 83 % of electorate.
It has no longer been a very simple trail for Mr. Santos, who used to be pressured to take away himself from his two committee assignments pending the belief of investigations into his non-public and marketing campaign budget.
His paintings in the House up to now has been in large part restricted to saber-rattling on Twitter and turning in speeches prior to a most commonly empty House chamber on subjects starting from Iran to Holocaust Remembrance Day. (Mr. Santos has falsely claimed that his grandparents escaped the Holocaust.)
Even so, the style in which Mr. Santos’s law, which he calls the SALT Relief Act, used to be presented underscores the first-term congressman’s isolation: A fellow New York Republican congressman, Nick LaLota, told Bloomberg News that he’ll no longer improve the invoice as a result of Mr. Santos is at the back of it.
Mr. Santos’s invoice additionally hews in a similar fashion to a bipartisan proposal announced in January by means of Representative Mikie Sherrill, Democrat of New Jersey, and Michael Lawler, Republican of New York, that will lift the cap to $100,000 for people and $200,000 for married {couples}.
Mr. Santos’s invoice would lift the cap from $10,000 to $50,000 for unmarried filers. When requested why he had opted to position forth his personal invoice, relatively than improve the proposal put forth by means of his colleagues, a spokeswoman didn’t right away reply to a request for remark.
Congressional Republicans are divided on how to reply to Mr. Santos. Leadership, mindful that a Santos resignation would imply a particular election in a aggressive district, has sought to attenuate the fallout of reporting on his misdeeds, together with marketing campaign finance problems and a pending prison fee in Brazil.
But New York Republicans — specifically the ones on Long Island — were a few of his sharpest critics and some of the first to name for his resignation.
Last week, Representative Anthony D’Esposito, who represents New York’s Fourth Congressional District on Long Island, introduced that he intends to introduce law that will limit lawmakers who’ve violated the general public accept as true with from profiting with e-book offers or media appearances. The invoice, whose operating identify is the ‘No Fortune for Fraud Act,’ would observe simplest to those that were convicted of a crime.
Though the law didn’t point out Mr. Santos by means of title, it’s been extensively reported to were aimed on the freshman congressman. Through a spokesman, Mr. D’Esposito mentioned that whilst he supported or even co-sponsored different efforts to boost the SALT cap, he would no longer paintings with Mr. Santos.
“D’Esposito has serious concerns over Santos’s ability to govern given Santos’s fraught relationship with the truth,” mentioned Matt Capp, a spokesman for Mr. D’Esposito. “And that extends to collaborating on legislation.”
The SALT tax factor has been a thorny one for states like New York and New Jersey, the place belongings values and taxes are excessive.
At one level, filers may deduct the quantity they paid on state and native taxes from their federal tax filings. But in 2017, Mr. Trump restricted the deduction to $10,000 to assist pay for different cuts in his tax plan, framing it as a giveaway to high-tax, Democratic-led states. Democrats searching for to revive the whole deduction have confronted evaluations from each Republicans and progressives over the contradiction between their birthday celebration’s nationwide message on source of revenue inequality, and the truth that such a tax reduce would basically receive advantages the rich.
Nationally, Republicans have in large part remained hostile to restoring the deduction. But in New York, the place Republicans helped their birthday celebration reclaim the House with an surprising resurgence in the midterms, the problem has huge improve.
In 2021, a bipartisan staff of lawmakers calling themselves the SALT Caucus used to be shaped to protest the $10,000 cap. Since then, contributors have put forth a number of proposals geared toward tweaking and even removing the deduction cap. But regardless of the bipartisan enchantment, the trouble has been an uphill struggle, due to intraparty confrontation and a tightly divided Congress.