Pascrell Applauds New Jersey Lawsuit against IRS, Mnuchin

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ-09), New Jersey’s only member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, praised the announcement by Governor Phil Murphy and state Attorney General Gurbir Grewal that New Jersey was suing the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin for their repeated attempts to block the Garden State from providing needed tax relief to its citizens.

“We told Trump and his enablers we’d see them in court and we meant: New Jersey is fighting back against Republicans’ ruthless tax scam law,” said Rep. Pascrell, the leader of House efforts to restore the full federal State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction. “To give a juicy tax break to the most powerful, Republican robbed the middle class and specifically targeted states like ours by gutting the SALT deduction. When state legislators passed commonsense measures to work around Republicans’ arson, Mnuchin blocked us again and again. It nothing but pure spite. Governor Murphy and Attorney General Grewal are doing the right by New Jerseyans. While they pursue their battle, I will continue to push Congress to pass a full reinstatement of SALT. New Jersey has to fight for every scrap of support we get, so it’s appropriate that our leaders in Trenton and our delegation in Congress teaming up to fight the tax policy corruption of the Trump administration.”

The Republican tax scam law in 2017 capped the state and local tax deduction, stripping millions of Americans of a deduction that had existed for generations. In response, New Jersey and several other states enacted so-called workaround measures to blunt the effect of the onerous SALT cap. IRS regulations issued by Secretary Mnuchin’s Treasury Department blocked those laws.

In January 2018, Pascrell stood with then-Gov.-elect Phil Murphy (D-NJ) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ-05) in support of state plans to work around the SALT cap. Rep. Pascrell has been a leading a critic in Congress of the Republican tax scam and has repeatedly assailed the capping of the SALT deduction. Pascrell is the lead sponsor of H.R. 1142, the bipartisan Stop the Attack on Local Taxpayers Act of 2019, which would remove the SALT cap. It is currently cosponsored by 45 House members. Companion Senate legislation, S. 437, is sponsored by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and currently cosponsored by 13 senators.

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