RELEASE OF TRUMP’S TAXES BLOWS UP BIG GOP MYTH

When the House Ways and Means Committee voted on Tuesday to release Donald Trump’s recent tax returns, one thing became clear: A major GOP claim about the quest for these returns has been exposed as bogus. The release of summary data also highlights a deeper argument between the parties about the legitimacy of congressional oversight, and even the functioning of government.

For years, Republicans insisted the Democratic demand for Trump’s returns — which started when he was president and continued after voters sent him back to his Mar-a-Lago estate — was nothing but a fishing expedition. When the Supreme Court ruled that Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee could access them, GOP outrage grew even louder.

But now that the committee has voted to release them, the big news isn’t just what will be found in the full returns. It’s also that longtime Democratic assertions about the need to access them have been vindicated.

Beyond showing that Trump paid no federal income taxes in 2020, the initial report revealed that the IRS violated its own rules, which require auditing of the president and vice president’s returns every year. Trump’s returns were not audited in 2017 or 2018, and the agency moved to begin audits only after Rep. Richard E. Neal, D- Mass., the committee chair, began requesting them.

It would be naive to claim Democrats’ quest for Trump’s taxes wasn’t political, at least in part. But in seeking them, committee Democrats also articulated a legitimate oversight goal: to determine whether the president was being properly audited.

As Neal noted in 2019, the question was whether the IRS was applying the law to the president “in a fair and impartial manner.” It should be self-evident that this is important public knowledge — exactly the sort of thing that judicious oversight should seek to determine.

Republicans are inclined to treat oversight as something that is inevitably political to its core, because they believe that government is bad or corrupt by default. In this telling, oversight was weaponized by Democrats, and Republicans will weaponize it in response.

Democrats, by contrast, operate from a different starting point. They are politicians, so the political benefits of oversight will of course tempt them, but they also tend to believe that oversight can and should be conducted in good faith, with a genuine public-interest rationale, and usually seek to meet that standard (while also behaving as politicians).

We don’t know why Trump’s returns were not audited. Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer notes that it could simply be that the IRS was “under-resourced.”

But this highlights another difference between the parties. Democrats look at this episode and resolve to give the IRS the money it needs. That’s why the big climate and health care bill increased IRS funding by $80 billion.

Republicans, meanwhile, think the IRS should be under-resourced, which is why they opposed that bill. As it happens, that money will fund more auditing for wealthy people (such as Trump), which also explains GOP opposition.

Surely Congress should determine why the IRS didn’t audit the president, whatever the reason. The Republican position, in effect, has been that Congress and the public should not know whether the IRS properly audited the taxes of the president of the United States, nor why it didn’t.

As Trump has demonstrated, norms are insufficient to make the system work. Every major-party nominee back to the 1970s voluntarily released their tax returns, and you can read them all online. Every nominee except one: Donald Trump.

The immense power of the presidency comes with immense potential for corruption. We need to know exactly where presidents get their income, whom they owe money to, and all the details of their finances.