Good to know they take this governing thing seriously. Rep. Bill Pascrell, one of the senior members on the House Ways and Means Committee, tells The Hill that the new majority plans to exercise its authority to get to the biggest issues facing the American people. Rather than that being how much tax Americans pay, the new Democratic majority wants to focus like a laser on how much tax Donald Trump has to pay:
House Democrats want to get their hands on President Trump’s tax returns, and plan to make the issue a key part of their agenda upon taking the majority next year. …
Democrats want to know if and how Trump is avoiding taxes, particularly in the wake of a lengthy New York Times story published in early October that said Trump and his family engaged in “dubious” tax schemes in the 1990s so that the president’s parents could avoid gift and estate taxes.
They also want to see how Trump is benefiting from the tax-cut law he signed last year, which to date is his biggest legislative accomplishment. And they want to learn about any conflicts of interests that Trump may have, including any links to foreign governments.
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), the top Democrat on the Ways and Means tax-policy subcommittee, said on a call with reporters Wednesday that obtaining Trump’s tax returns is “important in both guaranteeing our national security and in protecting the integrity of the tax code.”
This echoes what Rep. Richard Neal, the upcoming Democratic chair of Ways and Means, told The Hill the day after the election, as well as Rep. Eric Swalwell’s concurrence later that day:
Rep. Richard Neal: "I think the President has an opportunity here to diffuse this and just release the [tax] forms as every other candidate for President has done." https://t.co/uyGkzpViAd pic.twitter.com/zwx66dMbXu
— The Hill (@thehill) November 9, 2018
House Democrats expecting to make this a transparency issue might run into a few surprises, however. Yahoo’s Rick Newman reminds everyone that a subpoena for tax records doesn’t guarantee compliance, and even if it succeeds, publishing them is another matter entirely. All Democrats have won is the right to request the returns:
While Neal can ask for the returns, Trump can instruct his Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, to say no. “Congress has a legitimate right to ask for the information as part of its oversight role,” says Steve Rosenthal of the nonprofit Tax Policy Center, a tax lawyer and former counsel to Congress’s Joint Committee on Taxation. “What is less clear is whether the president would turn over his returns voluntarily. I think he’ll resist. They could construct some executive argument saying this is a fishing expedition.”
That’s an easy claim to make because this clearly is a fishing expedition. Newman notes that a court fight over a refusal would have to wind its way to the Supreme Court, where a solid conservative majority might demand more probable cause for an intrusion on privacy before approving the demand.
Even if they succeed in getting their hands on the returns, though, there may not be much they can do with them. The law restricts publication of returns, although House Democrats might rely on an age-old mechanism, Newman writes — the leak:
If the House does eventually get Trump’s tax returns, the next question is whether they could legally make them public, which is an unsettled matter that revolves around whether there’s a legitimate legislative reason to make such information public. There’s some irony here, because in 2014, House Republicans made public the tax returns of 51 nonprofit organizations the Ways and Means chairman, Dave Camp, had obtained from the IRS using the same statute Neal would use to get Trump’s returns. So Republicans established a precedent for going public. And if Trump’s returns didn’t find daylight through legal means, it’s hard to believe somebody wouldn’t leak them to the press.
That may be why courts will take a very dim view of a House fishing expedition in the first place. Congress had a reason to demand and publish those returns, which was the malfeasance of the IRS itself in dealing with non-profit applications for tax-exempt status. Even with that, Camp and other Republicans came under considerable criticismfor exposing the tax records of those taxpayers.
To some extent, though, all this misses the point. Bret Stephens warned Democrats yesterday that conducting a nakedly partisan attack on Trump via its newly minted majority authority would backfire spectacularly in two years:
No he doesn’t. No matter what Trump does or doesn’t do, the left will still scurry about and dig for SOMETHING with which to attack him. Aside from that, what IS the actual justification to dig into Trump’s returns?
What are they going to do then, slap him with a “contempt of Congress”? BWA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA!!
Oh, they wouldn’t. If there is nothing there but typical rich-guy tax blather, they’ll leak LIES about it, but like the FISA warrants, the real data only kills their narrative.
Democrats are not in the learning business. Or, governing business, for that matter. They are in the vengeance business and they are obsessed with it.
I now appreciate the obozo regime’s lesson that you can simply ignore Congressional subpoenas. Nice lesson from the former AG…
November 14, 2019 – Congress can seek eight years of Trump tax records after an appeals panel rejects his argument against the release and will now be heard by the US Supreme Court
@Greg: I’m pretty sure the majority of Supreme Court Justices have heard of the Constitution and the 4th Amendment even if many liberal judges choose to ignore it.
This is the first year people will see the tax relief of from repealing the mandate. They should put the line item as Trump bonus, if you like your refund keep your refund.