There’s literally a law that specifically says that certain people in Congress can get them, but can’t release the contents without going to jail. If this were a Republican asking for a Dem’s returns, and the Dem was saying the statute doesn’t count, how many cries about “rule of law” do you think we’d be hearing?
Does Congress require probable cause of a criminal violation to do investigations and oversight? Of course not. Keep in mind which articles of the constitution we are dealing with here.
Here’s one for you: did the IRS properly audit the returns of the President?
Every President, I believe, is audited annually. Are those audits bullshit or real? Does Congress NOT have the power to examine whether the IRS is following its own policies? Or, was the congressional investigation involving Lois Lerner also illegitimate?
Well thank goodness I had a good answer to your bad question!
Let me ask you a question: has every President since Nixon had their lives turned upside down by virtue of them voluntarily releasing tax returns? If not, why is Trump being so greatly harmed when no other President has cared about letting literally everyone in the world see their taxes?
It is not a question of whether or not they contain criminal information. The question is whether there is some sort of legitimate legislative purpose for them to have them. And, I can think of a lot of such purposes: Passing a law compelling Presidents to release their tax returns. Or beefing up certain conflict of interest laws in relation to the President or his/her associates, …
A couple of posters have come back to this as justification. A substantially similar issue has been litigated. The federal courts have ruled such a state law in California as unconstitutional in the context of ballot access. There has been a Supreme Court case (Torcaso v Watkins, Everson v Board of Education) regarding qualifications for federal office. In short, the courts have ruled that the Constitution lists the sole requirements for federal office which cannot be added to without an amendment.
Supreme Court precedent, as referred to by Justice Kagan during oral arguments, bars the use of Congressional subpoenas as a generalize fishing expedition. She noted that “a valid legislative purpose” (Kilbourn v Thompson) is required.
First, requiring a president to release his tax returns would be unconstitutional as a separation of powers issue and an addition to qualifications.
Second, you do concede that these are pretextual, bullshit reasons, right? Nobody cares about “beefing up” any laws. They want a quick peek at his tax returns, are miffed that he didn’t release them, and they want to take his ego down a notch by showing him that they won and he lost.
I didn’t realize how much power that people just believed that Congress had in this area. Can you give a good reason why they couldn’t get my tax returns or ask me how often I have sex with my wife under the reasons I posted above? You know, for legislative research; they want to look at how tax policy affects half way there alcoholic lawyers in rural areas and see whether they need what level of taxation is good for a rural upper middle class professional person.
If you would, tell me why Congress couldn’t do that, if I sufficiently pissed off a member and that member convinced the committee chair to issue that discovery.
This “implied” power seems overly broad. Yes, Congress has the power to legislate and the power to impeach, but I don’t see how it flows from that it can commandeer others into giving them information to legislate and impeach. As a parent I am given the power to set my daughter’s curfew. It doesn’t follow that I can use compulsory process to get any information I might need (or just pretend I need) to set that curfew. That’s a bridge way too far.
This is why I don’t understand why so many proposals are based on using some kind of force to compel the candidates themselves to “release” their returns. States kinda had to try that, it’s all they could do, but the federal government already has everyone’s federal tax returns. A new law could simply require that the IRS release to the FEC, which would be required to post them alongside the existing financial disclosures, the returns of every candidate who files to run for president.
Is current law requiring financial disclosures from the President unconstitutional? No, of course not. But Dems are making Trump uncomfortable and some people just can’t stand that, can they?
I think that’s a reasonable proposal, but oversight over the IRS as to whether they are actually carrying out their own policies is more compelling. I mean, does anyone believe that Congress should take the IRS at its word that it’s doing a good job?
Because there is a big difference between oversight over a branch of government for which checks and balances are supposed to apply, and the McCarthy hearings. How many times does this need to be explained? Calling in, say Wilbur Ross to explain his racist census question decision making isn’t at all like calling you in to describe your consultations with your clients.
The implied power of Congress, which has centuries of precedent, is on stronger footing than the fictional power made up of whole cloth by the President’s corrupt attorneys that the President can never be annoyed by Congress.
By the way, why haven’t you mentioned the intrusion into Bill Clinton’s sex life as an unconstitutional abuse?
I don’t see how such a requirement would be unconstitutional, though a law needs to be there for that to happen. However the way I see it is Trump lied and said he would release them, but that was a campaign lie, which is allowed, he does not need to disclose them to the public as it currently stands. However he is accountable, and his tax return should have to be released to congress (not the public) at the request of congress. They are our elected representatives and they can decide if any action needs to be taken which may include releasing them to the public if need be. Now if congress releases them improperly, well that’s a issue with them, not a reason to deny the legal request.
Financial disclosure requirements of the Ethics in Government Act have not, as far as I can find, been challenged in court. Justice Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v Olson (which upheld the Independent Counsel Act, a section of the Ethics in Government Act) certainly suggested the reason why noting, " it is difficult to vote not to enact, and even more difficult to vote to repeal, a statute called, appropriately enough, the Ethics in Government Act. If Congress is controlled by the party other than the one to which the President belongs, it has little incentive to repeal it; if it is controlled by the same party, it dare not."
Who would dare challenge disclosure requirements elsewhere in the EGA?
Exactly what I was going to say. The idea that this is an additional hurdle for candidates is absurd.
Hell, someone that wants to be on the ballot must file the appropriate paperwork, right? Is this an unconstitutional hurdle?
It’s 100% legitimate to say, “We think the public has an interest in knowing a presidential candidate’s financial history. Our current president has refused to disclose his history, and that’s led to years of uncertainty about things like whether he’s self-dealing, whether he’s violating the Emoluments clause, and even whether he has received payments from foreign nations. In writing this legislation, we’d like to see his financial records, to ensure that we write our legislation fairly and to prevent abuses of the sort he’s suspected to have engaged in. We anticipate that our bill will provide an exemption to IRS privacy codes, such that the tax records of presidential candidates are released to the public by the IRS no later than 2 weeks after they have been confirmed for at least one state ballot.”
A constitutional amendment to require tax filing disclosures would certainly be the way to deal with it. And, in line with Scalia’s dissent I quoted above, who in Congress would dare vote against it?
The question is if we can get candidates elected to the House and Senate to make it a real issue, keep the press focused on it, and actually introduce a well drafted proposed amendment. I think this is one area where the pressure of a public vote would be very strongly in favor of passage.
A constitutional amendment isn’t needed. It isn’t a requirement for office.
Look, the FEC is required to disclose candidate spending and donations. The IRS can be required to disclose tax returns for Federal elected officials and cabinet officers. Done and done.
Trump’s tax returns do not exist isolated in the ether. The IRS has them, right? The NYS and NYC equivalents have them, right? If any of those entities saw something sketchy, they have the records already.
If, as I understand it, someone has a suspicion of a crime and issues a warrant or subpoena, the crime and/ or evidence being sought should be specified. If the police want to search my house because they have reasonable suspicion that I am trafficking fentanyl from Wuhan they wouls specify that and not say ‘we think there’s something funny going on and we want to look for evidence’.
I’m frankly surprised noone has leaked the tax returns already.
It isn’t a requirement for office, but if you run, we will subpoena them and they will be released. Sounds like a requirement.
Further, you keep going back to how I am a private citizen. I don’t see how that matters. If Congress is looking into tax policy in rural areas, then my status as a private citizen should give me a lesser claim to privacy than when they try that against a co-equal branch of government.
As Iggy said, this has not been challenged, yet there is a practical difference. We aren’t invading anything private. We want to know how much you have spent on the campaign and who has donated larger sums of money to you. These are all public transactions which could be gathered by anyone with a lot of time on their hands. Further, a candidate has a choice to spend no money and accept no donations and he still may be elected.
The IRS is a part of the executive branch of government. To pass a law requiring it to disclose the president’s tax returns is no different than requiring the president to disclose his own tax returns.
Both states today in the SCOTUS arguments regarding electors agreed that a requirement that a candidate release his tax returns would violate the Qualifications Clause.
But if there was a ‘smoking gun’ anywhere, I am sure someone would find a way to get it into the press. Trump is not universally liked, you may have heard.
Traditionally SC justice appointees nominated by both the left and the right have ended up surprising and disappointing the presidents who nominated them. If nothing else the SC values its autonomy; how is the Republican party “controlling” the court other than having some broadly conservative justices on the bench?
I’m not panicking yet. My understanding is that in the Supreme Court the oral arguments are largely irrelevant and mostly for show. The Justices have read the briefs and know where they stand on the issue before them. They are unlikely to sacrifice the rule of law for a generation simply because a lawyer had a bad day.
I mentioned this in a different thread but my ex wife used to visit military bases as part of her job. Most of the time she needed no background check for that. She had to go through an extensive background check to visit an IRS building . And she was not going to do anything with any of their IT systems. I expect that their systems keep track of anybody who looks up a return so it would be easy to find out if anyone leaked Trumps info.
Because there are 5 partisan Republicans on the court right now. Maybe they say they’re nonpartisan, but their actions and words demonstrate that this is false.