As I've noted, our incoming governor is greatly enamored of cliches.

Last week he came up with one I'd never heard before.

At an impromptu press conference in Trenton Thursday, Phil Murphy was asked what he intends to do if President Trump signs into law a tax package that would permit so-called "double taxation" of income by the federal government.

"We will tear up the floorboards," he said. "We will exhaust every means to fight back, legal and otherwise."

Tear up the floorboards? When I did an internet search, the only reference I could come up with was a lyric from a song by an indie-rock band named The Mountain Goats. It was titled "The House That Dripped Blood." (See video below)

That sounds about right.

So does that other cliche, the one about politics making for strange bedfellows.

If this fight ever comes to a head in the U.S. Supreme Court, Murphy might find an ally in the sharpest legal mind to come out of Trenton - not to mention the entire nation.

That of course is Sam Alito, the son of the former head of the Office of Legislative services and current Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is whether the federal government should be able to collect income tax on revenue that has already been subject to state and local taxation ("SALT" for short.)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has already said he would go to court to block any effort by Congress to make SALT payments taxable, and Murphy again invoked that cliche as he promised to join in that effort.

"We have been consulting with legal scholars to figure out what it means to tear up the floorboards and exhaust all options," he said.

When those legal scholars started ripping up those floors, they will find that the conservative Alito and his crowbar have been there before them.

Back in 2015, he authored the decision in a case called Wynne vs. Comptroller of Maryland that dealt with double taxation. It seems various counties in Maryland were refusing to give taxpayers credit for taxes they had paid in other states.

Virtually all of the conservative legal think tanks filed briefs supporting Mr. and Mrs. Wynne, who ran a small business.

Meanwhile the Obama administration argued Maryland should be able to impose whatever taxes it deemed necessary.

Alito disagreed. He wrote that the high court had already ruled unconstitutional "the discriminatory double taxation of income earned out of state." This effort by Maryland fell into that category and was thus prohibited by the Commerce Clause of the constitution, the court ruled by a 5-4 margin.

The Commerce Clause would not apply to any effort to oppose double taxation on the federal level. That means the opponents would face a much tougher challenge.

We got a preview of it back during the 1986 Reagan tax reform. The same debate was being fought out back then. One difference was that many of the states hardest hit by the loss of the SALT deductions were represented by Republicans.

Among them was California, where conservative Republican Sen. Pete Wilson joined with Democrat Sen. Alan Cranston to fight the effort to retain the deductions. At a joint press conference, Cranston made this intriguing argument:

"People can deduct taxes they pay to foreign governments, but they can't deduct taxes they pay to their own state or city?" Cranston asked. "That would increase the unfair discrimination our tax laws already make against Americans who work in America."

Meanwhile conservative columnist Edwin Yoder argued against ending SALT deductions on federalist grounds.

"The principled point is the need to guard the vitality of state and local government, not to impair it by hogging still more traditionally local tax sources for the federal Treasury," Yoder wrote. "In a better hour you can imagine Ronald Reagan, who sometimes poses as a federalist, voicing these sentiments."

Reagan eventually came around to that side of the argument and agreed to retain the deductions. Murphy's policy advisor, Rutgers economist Carl Van Horn, was senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee back then.

Vah Horn happened to be at that press conference Thursday. He noted that when the income tax was the adopted by constitutional amendment in 1913, there was near-universal opposition to double taxation.

"It was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now," Van Horn said.

It certainly looks that way. But at the moment it looks like it's going to pass both houses.

So the Governor-elect better start ripping up those floorboards.

Otherwise he's not going to have a leg to stand on.