Rep. Mike Lawler is pouring his political capital into the fight over a key tax deduction — staking his future on monthslong tax policy talks that will heat up Saturday when he and other blue-state Republicans meet with President-elect Donald Trump. The media-savvy moderate, who recently won reelection as a Republican in a heavily Democratic New York suburb, would achieve hero status at home if negotiations result in Trump lifting the state and local tax deduction cap known as SALT. The bigger the increase, the brighter his prospects — especially as he weighs a bid for New York governor. And Lawler isn’t alone. House colleagues in New York, New Jersey and California — where property taxes can easily exceed the current $10,000 cap for middle-class homeowners — will join him this weekend at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago transition headquarters to advocate for tax relief. The battleground members in the closely divided House know SALT could make or break their midterm campaigns, and interviews with six of them across the three states illuminated their strategy. They plan to remind Trump of his campaign promise to “get SALT back,” argue that the deduction helps middle-class voters in states that help decide House control and even appeal to him as a fellow New York property owner.

“The reality is that we’re going to lift the cap on SALT, period,” Lawler told POLITICO after reintroducing a bill to boost the deduction limit to $100,000 for single filers and $200,000 for married couples filing jointly. “First of all, if no tax bill passes, SALT comes back unlimited,” he added. “So the incentive is on everybody to negotiate in good faith over the entirety of the tax bill.” The so-called SALT Republicans believe they have leverage as they go up against GOP colleagues from around the country who see the deduction as a handout to the wealthiest states. They definitely have the numbers. House Speaker Mike Johnson has a 219-seat majority, just one more than the minimum necessary to pass legislation. Native New Yorker Trump’s campaign-trail vow on SALT — with the House majority on the line — would undo part of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, but his team hasn’t specified what that would look like. The returning president’s signature tax package is set to expire at the end of the year, and the debate over the renewal of trillions of dollars’ worth of cuts, especially for corporations and the wealthy, will feature the future of SALT as a chief sticking point. SALT Republicans aren’t publicly naming their floor as they prepare for the Mar-a-Lago meeting. “We need to move in the direction of higher.

Nobody has the best sense of exactly what it will be,” Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said. Simply doubling the cap, as some in the Trump admin have suggested, is “1,000 percent” insufficient, Lawler said. What’s clearer is that a full restoration of the deduction — which Democrats are clamoring for — is likely a nonstarter. “I think we need to be reasonable and recognize that it’s not going to be unlimited,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) said. “It needs to be targeted to the middle class.” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and the Democrats will have a lot of influence, given that they have 215 seats. But it’s the SALT Republicans who will wield much more power as Johnson (R-La.) seeks to hold his caucus together, since Republican leaders are planning to use a legislative tactic that will require only GOP votes. Lose their votes and the GOP could lose its tax bill. In 2017, nearly all of the 12 Republicans who voted against Trump’s tax package did so in protest of the SALT deduction limit.

Several SALT Republicans gathered earlier this week on Capitol Hill with Ways and Means Committee members who’ll be writing the tax code. Little appeared to emerge from the closed-door talks beyond the acknowledgement that this debate could get messy, because tax relief for one part of the country can mean more tax burden for another. “As you lower taxes in one area, that potentially has the effect of increasing taxes in another area,” he said in an interview Thursday, adding that there’s “the Rubik’s cube sort of approach to the tax code, and there’s an acknowledgement that SALT Republicans are going to get a win on SALT.” On the Democratic side, frontline Rep. Tom Suozzi of Long Island has long made it a key cause, saying he’ll use his reappointment to the powerful Ways and Means Committee to advance the fight. Newly elected Rep. Laura Gillen of Long Island used her first letter to congressional leadership to advocate for a bipartisan solution for SALT. And Rep. Pat Ryan of the Hudson Valley has demanded that Democrats be included in the Mar-a-Lago summit, trumpeting that he’s ready to go there himself.