Nov. 19, 2024, 7:40 p.m.
Serving as the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee’s tax subcommittee, former Rep. Peter Roskam played a key role in shepherding the Trump administration’s signature Tax Cuts and Jobs Act through the House in 2017. Some provisions of the TCJA are set to expire at the end of 2025, marking another opportunity for the incoming Trump administration to revisit tax policy. Republican leaders have said that, like last time, they want to advance the measure using budget reconciliation, which will help them overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. Roskam, who now serves as leader of BakerHostetler’s federal-policy team, spoke to National Journal about the upcoming tax bill. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
What are your thoughts on timing for this reconciliation bill? Do you think it will come earlier in the year or closer to the end-of-December deadline for the expiring provisions? What’s the first hurdle?
I think that the leadership intends to move as quickly as possible, and the operative phrase is “as possible.”
The first question that has to be determined is, what’s the actual number? What’s the tolerance for debt? Once that gets determined, then it’s a matter of whipping the vote. And so it becomes a chicken-and-an-egg dynamic right now. My experience is TCJA, and with TCJA we had $1.5 trillion to deal with. That became the four corners of the document, and everything was evaluated on that. That’s not how this situation is. This situation is that there is ambiguity as to the number, and therefore there’s ambiguity as to what’s going into the bill itself.
There’s a couple factors here. One is the president made some big commitments on the campaign trail. He made a commitment in terms of overtime. He made a commitment in terms of tips. He made a commitment about Social Security benefits and made a commitment in terms of the SALT deduction. So are those commitments bumper stickers and campaign phrases, or are those going to drive policy? If they're going to drive policy, then members have work to do in terms of vetting them, because you can imagine the workarounds—just declaring something is overtime, just declaring something is a tip, and so forth.
On the whip operation, what’s an example of how you got most of the conference to back TCJA?
We lost a couple of Republicans [on the final vote]. But here’s what’s interesting—we went off-site. We took all the House Republicans in buses and we went off-site for a morning. I think it was Fort McNair, and we called it Tax Camp. Kevin Brady took half of the group and walked through the business concepts. I took the other half of the group and walked through the individual concepts. Then we switched groups, came back, and there was an open mic.
People came to the microphones, and they didn’t say it this way, but what they were articulating was, "I am going to vote for this bill, and I am counting on the Ways and Means Committee to make sure that this particular question is well vetted, because what I don't want to have happen is for this to hit me in the back of the head in 18 months."
People were very forward-leaning and kind of giving the committee the benefit of the doubt. It wasn't carte blanche, but you take my point, yeah? I will be interested to see what direction this goes.
Trump may be looking to pay for some of the bill by raising tariffs. Can he do that in a reconciliation bill?
The Senate parliamentarian will have the last word procedurally, and so I don’t know. And frankly nobody does.
There’s a policy question, too, though, and that is it’s been decades since we have had a real trade debate in this country. For a long time it has been sort of settled doctrine that low trade barriers are a good thing. That’s obviously shifted on both sides of the aisle, and so the ramifications beyond platitudes about trade are going to get very real. It’s one thing to assert an aggressive trade policy vis-a-vis China. Nobody’s doing a candlelight vigil for China these days. But it’s an entirely different proposition to talk about this across the board, in large swaths of the economy, particularly American agriculture.
Is there anything aside from the expiring provisions that could be changed in TCJA?
I do think there’s two things. One is [the state and local tax-deduction cap] within TCJA. It’s one thing for New York and California members to introduce a SALT repeal and fall short. It’s another thing to ask [House Republicans] to affirmatively move forward with it. And so that will be a significant dynamic.
The other is not in TCJA, and that is the Inflation Reduction Act provisions. The green energy provisions, which, based on a normal calculus of a Republican reconciliation process, you’d say, "for sure, those are on the chopping block," and yet there are red-state constituencies for some of those provisions. And so I’m of the view that there will be some surprises and some Republican defenders of some of these things.
Aside from the reconciliation bill, do you see space for other major tax legislation in the upcoming Congress, or is it their one bite at the apple?
I think this is the one bite at the apple. It’s so big. It’s going to be so exhausting and all-consuming, and it’s going to draw in members off committee. And I think that what you will see, because in the House the whipping process will be so tight, that rank-and-file members are going to have a disproportionately significant role. I think that this is going to take up all the tax bandwidth.
Any advice for your colleagues on Ways and Means or the whip team from someone who’s been in the trenches?
Hold it lightly. In other words, the ability to go out and actively and intentionally listen is paramount. When they’re whipping and someone comes with a suggestion, if it’s an impossible suggestion to accommodate, tell them immediately. If it’s something that you can take a look at, take a look at it and try to accommodate them. But maintain an openness, because this bill is going to be different than people are anticipating. It will look different when it’s all said and done.
