New York will continue to fight for states' rights as it brings numerous lawsuits against the federal government, state Attorney General Barbara Underwood told a gathering of the Citizens Budget Commission in Manhattan on Thursday.
“My office together with a coalition of like-minded state attorneys general has been actively fighting in the courts,” Underwood said. “We’ve filed more than 140 legal actions against the Trump Administration’s assaults on our environment, our workers, our health and our civil rights.”
She cited the recent
“Earlier this week, we sued to stop the assault on New York taxpayers through the rollback of the state and local tax deduction of federal income taxes – the deduction known as SALT,” she said. “For the entire history of our nation, every single federal income tax law has provided a deduction for all, or nearly all, state and local taxes in order to protect the right of states to invest as they found necessary.”
She said the cap was unconstitutional and needed to be repealed.
“Last year Congress drastically limited the deduction, imposing an enormous burden on taxpayers in our state, costing New Yorkers an additional $14.3 billion in 2018 alone,” she said. “This cap is unconstitutional for two main reasons. First, it violates long-settled limits of the scope of the federal government’s power to impose an income tax. And second, Congress deliberately targeted New York and similar states for unfavorable treatment, seeking to coerce our states into changing our fiscal policies and the important public investments and services those policies support.”
She said that beyond the legal arguments, limiting the SALT deduction poses a real threat to critical services that New Yorkers rely on, such as education, healthcare and infrastructure investment.
She said has made the choice to make these investment and that this has made the state economy healthy and vibrant. “The attack on SALT puts all that at risk,” Underwood said.
Underwood also said the state has brought suit “to ensure a fair and equitable census in 2020, challenging the federal government’s plan to demand citizenship status information.”
She said that question would probably deter many immigrant families from responding to the census and that this would depress the count of people in the state. This, in turn, might affect New York’s representation in Congress, in the Electoral College and the billions of dollars in federal funding that the state gets for infrastructure, education and Medicaid, all of which is based on census data.
Underwood worked as the state’s Solicitor General since 2007 and took over as attorney general in May after the resignation of Eric Schneiderman amid sexual harassment allegations.
She was chosen by the state legislature to fill out the remainder of Schneiderman’s term and is the first woman to hold the post in New York. She said on Thursday she would not run for office and would be happy to stay on to assist the new attorney general if asked to do so.
She also served as the Acting Solicitor General of the United States and as Principal Deputy Solicitor General. She has argued 20 cases before the United States Supreme Court and has extensive appellate experience in both federal and state courts of appeals.
Additionally, Underwood has worked in the Office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York and in two New York City District Attorney’s Offices for Brooklyn and Queens, as well as serving as a trial attorney in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
