On Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Your World,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) argued that it would be best to combine border, tax, and energy legislation into one reconciliation bill because everyone will want some part of the bill and stated that doing the plan as one bill is the best way to ensure some relief under the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.
Malliotakis said, [relevant remarks begin around 2:40] “I think we need to try to do everything in one reconciliation. You have border states that obviously care about the border. I think a majority of Americans do, it’s impacting states all over the country. You have energy-producing states that want to see us ramp up domestic production. It will help lower prices, not just for energy, but for food and goods across the country. And then you have states like New York that care about the SALT deduction, providing some type of SALT relief for constituents. And the people of the Ways and Means Committee, of which I’m a member, I would tell you that tax cuts [have] to be part of that negotiation. Why? Because if we leave it to the end of the year, it may fall off the table. We need to work it in with everything else that’s currently there.”
She added that doing everything in one bill makes sense “because everybody kind of wants something, whether it’s the border security or the energy production or the tax cuts. If we put it all together, we could satisfy a lot of members and build consensus that way. And you also have to remember, the Senate, with 53 Republican votes, they need seven votes to pass that something, unless we do it in reconciliation. So, you may have a difficult time getting seven Democrat senators to side with us to extend Trump’s tax cuts. And so, this is something that is important, we saw millions of Americans benefit, millions of jobs created, we saw repatriation of American business, manufacturing. We can build on that success. And you also have President Trump wanting to lower taxes for seniors, we want to increase that standard deduction, provide some SALT relief. So, the only way we’re going to do that, I think, is if we get it in the first package. If you leave it until the end of the year, you’re going to have a real risk of the whole thing expiring, which will be detrimental to our economy and to the American families that we represent.”
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