‘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.