When Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) led his crazy eight Republican comrades to join with the entire Democratic caucus to eject Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from the House speakership, the Florida rabble-rouser claimed to do so in the name of reducing federal spending, saying, "I don't think the adult in the room would allow America to sit atop a $33 trillion debt facing $2.2 trillion annual deficits." Two weeks, two failed speakership votes, two speaker nominees later, and Gaetz's hand-picked successor to McCarthy is now promising to overturn one of Donald Trump's marquee achievements in deficit reduction in exchange for winning the speakership.

DEMOCRATIC LIES ARE ENDANGERING AMERICAN LIVES

Despite actually losing votes during his second failed attempt to replace McCarthy, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) is now trying to win the votes of dozens of purple and blue-district Republicans in exchange for lifting Trump's state and local tax deduction cap from $10,000 to $20,000. This tax break, which benefits mostly blue state residents earning a quarter million dollars annually, would cost the rest of the nation's taxpayers $54 billion through 2025, according to the Tax Foundation.

As a matter of pure deficit reduction, Trump's SALT cap reduced the deduction's cost to Uncle Sam from $104 billion in 2017 to just $10 billion in losses in 2018, with the Joint Committee on Taxation estimating the cap saves the government nearly $700 billion from its inception to the major TCJA expirations in 2027. While Trump wasn't merely concerned with deficit reduction, he wisely used those spending cuts to pay for tax code simplification, tax breaks for the middle class, and most crucially, lowering the corporate tax rate to the OECD average, which spurred overall economic growth.

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So in the name of winning a speakership that Gaetz only blew up in the name of deficit reduction, Jordan wanted to sacrifice a signature accomplishment of his presidential favorite. Furthermore, he wanted to do so in a way that would cut a massive tax break for rich residents of Democratic-run oligarchies while penalizing red state residents and the middle class.

If the political capital of Biden-district Republicans must be spent on anything, it should be on abolishing the SALT deduction entirely, not on forcing through Jordan to a speakership he cannot win. That Jordan saw the reverse as ideal says much about the lamentable state of the Republican Party as a whole and its House agents in particular.