Norcross wants to talk. Do legislators have the guts to press him on shady tax break?

New Jersey politics is easy to understand these days: It is all about Gov. Phil Murphy, the gawky new kid with no friends, and his titanic battle with George Norcross, the bully who scares every kid on the playground.

Norcross knocked Murphy down hard twice last week, as the Legislature rejected Murphy’s tax on millionaires, and extended an expensive corporate subsidy program that Murphy has vowed to kill, or at least revamp. In both cases, the votes were landslides, enough to override a veto from Murphy.

So much for the theory that says New Jersey has the country’s most powerful governor. Murphy is on the verge of becoming irrelevant.

But the fight’s not over quite yet.

Norcross has one vulnerability, and that means Murphy has one hope: It lies with the investigation into those corporate subsidies, and the question of whether Norcross and his allies engaged in fraud to win tax breaks they didn’t deserve. In a 79-page report released last week, the task force offers damning evidence.

Read more: https://www.nj.com/opinion/2019/06/norcross-wants-to-talk-do-legislators-have-the-guts-to-press-him-on-shady-tax-break.html