Ways and Means committee likely to release Trump’s midterms
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With the party still wholly owned by Donald Trump posed to take over the House, looks like Ways and Means will do the right thing:
A House committee is expected to vote Tuesday afternoon on whether to make public tax returns belonging to former President Donald J. Trump, who broke with modern precedent by keeping his finances confidential during his campaign and while in office.
The mostly closed-door meeting of the Ways and Means Committee is likely to bring an end to a longstanding battle that Democrats in the House have been waging since 2019, when they took over the chamber and began trying to perform oversight of Mr. Trump. Republicans, who are expected to oppose any bid to make Mr. Trump’s returns public, will regain control of the chamber next month.
A rarely used federal law allows the committee to obtain any U.S. taxpayer’s returns. While the statute generally requires lawmakers to keep such information confidential, it also empowers them to make it public by voting to report the material to the full House.
Democrats have said they needed Mr. Trump’s records from 2015 to 2020 to assess an I.R.S. program that audits presidents. Republicans in turn have insisted that rationale was a pretext for a politically motivated fishing expedition they say lacks a legitimate legislative purpose.
And since this is too rarely acknowledged in the mainstream press, Republicans 1)needless to say have no principled opposition to releasing tax returns and 2)their attempt to gin up an IRS scandal under Obama was 100% pure bullshit:
And after a party-line vote in 2014, Republicans used it to release information about groups applying for tax-exempt status. (At the time, Republicans accused the I.R.S. of singling out conservative groups for scrutiny in determining their eligibility for tax-deductible charitable donations. It turned out the I.R.S. had used words associated with conservative and liberal politics alike in picking which groups to examine.)
“Ignoring the wingnut who cried wolf” is a very important lesson to learn.