Nancy Pelosi Taunts Trump Over SCOTUS Releasing His Taxes

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House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who recently announced she would be departing party leadership in the chamber in the new Congress, although she is remaining in her House seat, welcomed the U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of Trump’s attempt to block the House Ways and Means Committee from accessing his tax returns.

“Today’s Supreme Court ruling upholds our Democracy, the rule of law and the Congress’ ability to execute its legislative and oversight responsibilities,” Pelosi said this week. “Now, the Congress must enact legislation requiring Presidents and candidates for President to disclose their tax returns. The Supreme Court’s commonsense decision will allow the IRS to comply with federal law and deliver the former President’s tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee. These documents are vital to meeting the House’s Constitutional mandate: guarding the public interest, defending our national security and holding our public officials to account. The House looks forward to promptly receiving and reviewing these documents, and we extend our deepest thanks to Chairman Richard Neal for his deliberate, principled leadership in the fight to advance ethical, transparent governance For The People.”

There is legislation that lets that House panel obtain tax returns for individual Americans in the course of its legislative work — the contours of which can sometimes be hotly contested, but federal financial authorities declined to comply with it when the committee requested some of Donald’s returns after Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms. The Trump administration itself was still in power at the time. The same law that allows that particular panel to obtain any taxpayer’s returns also allows publishing those returns in the Congressional Record, although it’s not immediately clear whether the committee would do such a thing in the remaining weeks of Democratic control. (It’ll switch over in January with the seating of a new Congress in which Republicans lead the chamber.) The committee has tied its push for the records encompassing half a dozen years to specific legislative concerns about IRS procedures governing presidential audits.

A member of the panel also tied their interest in obtaining the records to general oversight. Trump infamously refused to release his personal tax returns, although many other contenders for president have done so. Before the Supreme Court’s refusal to — in specific terms — extend a hold on previous findings in favor of the House going into effect, the matter moved through years of litigation at multiple levels of the federal judiciary, including a temporary extension of the hold by Chief Justice John Roberts on the Supreme Court. Trump loses, well, a lot in the judiciary in attempts at hiding his records, whether they’re the administration records he wanted shielded from the House committee investigating January 6 or the tax records he sought to keep hidden from prosecuting authorities in New York City, where he was put under investigation for financial issues including hush money to women with whom he had affairs and lies about the value of business assets. The Supreme Court ruled against Donald in both matters.

Image: Gage Skidmore/ Creative Commons