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A NEW CHAPTER opened in the COVID story when Congress was preparing to pass the CARES Act.
Even at this time of crisis, the process was mired in politics. The Republican Senate didn’t want to give federal funds to Democratic states for the simple reason that it wasn’t in their political interest. Even in the middle of a historic world pandemic, Republican senators could not see beyond their own self-interest.
Trump personifies this divide, and his affirmative hostility to New York has long been a fundamental problem for me. Everything Trump did to New York was a negative. His tax reform plan of 2017 included ending the deductibility of state and local taxes, which hurt New York more than any other state. It also hurt other Democratic states, including California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, and Connecticut. It was the height of Republican hypocrisy. It turns out that the party that is against redistribution of income is only against redistribution if they don’t benefit. SALT took tax dollars from Democratic states and gave them to Republican states. It was redistribution on steroids, and it was vicious to New York.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was obsessed with the fact that New York State contributes more in tax dollars than any state in the United States. And he was right. We contribute more to the federal government than we get back, and our differential is the highest in the nation. New York subsidizes Kentucky, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and most of the Republican states. The Republican senators Mitch McConnell from Kentucky and Rick Scott from Florida are the greatest hypocrites, because their states get much more in federal funds than they contribute. This is nothing new and has been a long-term issue. However, the SALT provision and tax reform increased this disparity by forcing New York to contribute an additional $14 billion to the federal trough. I have been working to get the SALT provision repealed since it was passed three years ago. To further compound the injustice, after the COVID pandemic, Congress’s first piece of legislation bailed out all the classic Republican donors—wealthy businessmen.
Even at this critical moment, their bailout legislation did not assist state and local governments, which fund essential services like police and firefighters—the very essential workers we were now relying on. Why? Because the states that had the highest number of COVID cases were Democratic states. McConnell was quoted saying he didn’t want to “bail out blue states.” Bail out blue states? It is the blue states that have supported his state for decades. In addition, all economists say that you cannot maximize an economic recovery without state and local governments functioning.
I have been in many negotiating sessions on many levels with many private sector and political leaders. In certain ways, the easiest personalities to negotiate with are the most extreme. Effective negotiating requires one to understand the situation from the other person’s point of view. The old expression “check your ego at the door” is profound. If you can check your own and only seek to understand what drives the other person, you can succeed in the encounter. With Trump I had no ego. His attacks don’t bother me, and his praise doesn’t flatter me. The only question was how I could get him to help New York.
In most dealings between adversaries in government, there is a line that you don’t cross. But with the Trump administration, there is no line. If something is in their political interest, they are capable of doing anything with no ethical or moral boundaries. I had seen it firsthand.
We had been in a court battle with Trump’s Department of Homeland Security over the Trusted Traveler Program (a.k.a. Global Entry). I have dealt with DHS extensively over the years, and I knew its leaders were blatant political operatives. Since New York had implemented a policy of giving driver’s licenses to undocumented people earlier in the year, DHS had barred New York residents from gaining global entry, unless we would give up our database, which was in effect a list of all undocumented people in the state with home addresses and pictures. We refused. The Trusted Traveler Program had absolutely nothing to do with access to driver’s licenses for undocumented people, and DHS admitted it. I was amazed that Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, and his deputy would stoop to such a low level. It was clearly unethical and possibly illegal conduct on their part. I’m not sure if they are ignorant or arrogant or both.
The Trump administration had previously instituted policies that have been much more damaging to New York than the Trusted Traveler Program, including SALT. They refused to fund Amtrak’s train tunnels cross the Hudson, which were vital not just to New York but to the entire northeast corridor from D.C. to Boston, and withheld the funding to extend New York City’s Second Avenue subway line. They gratuitously denied approval of an air train to LaGuardia Airport and a congestion pricing plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). The suspension of the Trusted Traveler Program was relatively small compared with those issues, but again for me their actions were reprehensible and represented a pattern of unethical and possibly illegal conduct.
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BACK IN FEBRUARY, I’d called the president and attempted to explain the Trusted Traveler situation to him, but it was complicated, so I asked for a meeting. That trip down to Washington, D.C., was memorable.
My special counsel, Beth Garvey, and I took off
