Congress will be releasing Mr. Trump's tax returns from during his original campaign and Presidency. Most modern Presidents have just made them public as a matter of routine; he refused, saying he was under audit.
But it is apparently mandatory for IRS to audit the tax returns of a sitting President. That was news to me this morning and I'm in favor of it. If any President used the complimentary shampoo at the hotel in Far-off Foreignistan, or the High Panjadrum there slipped him a diamond necklace, I want to know about it. Whatever spare change he earned selling copies of Grit or hawking his autobiography, I want to know about it. If he's given a huge wheel of cheese, lets it sit in the entrance hall of the White House for a year and then invites the public to drop by and eat it up? I want an accounting of it -- and if he charges them a dime a nibble, he'd damned well better report that income.
Here's the punchline: until 2019, none of Mr. Trump's Presidential-time tax returns were under audit. That year, IRS apparently began to take a look at his 2015 (or 2016; reports vary) return, in a manner far more desultory than they did the year they decided losses on some rental property I owned weren't deductible but the income from it was, threw out my return and stuck me with a huge tax bill that took a decade to pay off. --But of course, I wasn't their boss. The good news is that if you've been fretting over a Federal "Deep State" gunning for poor old innocent Donald Trump, you can unclench: IRS is one of the biggest hammers in the Federal toolbox, and they deferred to the Chief Executive so abjectly that they didn't even do the auditing they are required by law to do.
Meanwhile, their boss lied about being audited as an excuse not to make his tax returns public, even though there's nothing in the IRS audit process that demands secrecy. The IRS knew his claim was untrue -- but said nothing, presumably unwilling to contradict the big man. That's not a Deep State, it's a state of spinelessness.
Elsewhere, the pundits are chewing away at the January 6 Committee's referrals to the Department of Justice, which include criminal charges for Mr. Trump's role in various phases of the insurrection and attempted autogolpe. DOJ already had a Special Prosecutor on the job and their own list of possible charges (which as far as I know, they haven't shared), so it's impossible to know how all that's going to play out until it happens. It's an ugly example of a very old principle: "If you strike at a king, don't miss." Over at The Bulwark+,* Jonathan V. Last lays out the three possibilities and they're all bad:
1. Do nothing: "Boys will be boys," which will show there's no downside to trying to grab the government by stealth or force other than some bad press. In that case, it will happen again and again. Eventually, someone's going to succeed and it's not going to matter much what flavor of authoritarian we get, it'll suck. It'll be way worse, way sooner for some people than for others but in the not-so-long run, we'll all lose. Even a cursory glance at 20th Century history makes that obvious.
2. Go to court and lose: the same outcome as the first option, only now hard-core Trumpists (a subset of Republicans but a good-sized one) are even angrier than they were. Expect more couping, now with extra revenge! At least he will have had his day in court and with diligent attorneys on both sides, we can reasonably expect that a lot more of the facts will come to light. And it does raise the stakes for any future coup attempts.
3. Go to court and win: This is still not a happy reconciliation and a return to the halcyon days of yore; Mr. Trump's supporters will be madder yet, he'll be able to point to the trial as even more evidence for his claims of being persecuted and we'll still be short one functioning, normal political party. On the other hand, we have the same benefit as option 2: the lawyers are going to be able to do some serious digging, witnesses will have to testify under oath and they will have far fewer excuses for keeping secrets.
These are all lousy outcomes -- and they're all the result of a President who treated losing an election like he was having trouble getting a zoning exemption or attempting a hostile corporate takeover, resorting to guile and threats when a straightforward effort failed. But our Federal government isn't a zoning board or a business enterprise, and you can't do things that way. Career politicians know this; you can say a lot bad about them, lazy, feckless, slippery or even stupid, but nearly all of them know where the bottom is and why you don't try to dig through it. Donald Trump did not share that awareness and he still doesn't.
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* The bulk of the article is paywalled, so don't ask me about his insightful conclusion; but as a nation, we'd already jumped out of the airplane by the end of the day on 6 January 2021 and from there down, the question is what we're going to use for a parachute and how hard we're going to hit when we inevitably reach the ground.
As I understand it, it is illegal for Congress to release Trump's tax returns. If it is, I wonder if the Congresspeople who release them will be immune from prosecution or lawsuit under the privilege and debate clause.
ReplyDeleteI'm reminded of this exchange from A Man For All Seasons:
"William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!"
I wonder just why a President would defy forty years of tradition: his predecessors all released their tax returns, with varying degrees of grace about it. He may have leaked his 2005 return, which was unremarkable; it got out somehow and the press pounced on it, only to find a nothingburger. But it occasioned discussion of the issue of releasing tax records.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, Congress makes those laws and is chock-ful of lawyers, so I wouldn't want to bet against there being a loophole quite big enough to throw a few years of Presidential Form 1040s through.
Personally, I'd make Presidents -- all of them -- live in a glass house and make all of their non-secret info publicly accessible if I could and I'd do the same to every member of Congress, so I am not an unbiased commentator. With great power should come unrelenting scrutiny and if they don't like it, they can find another line of work.
Ah, here we go, the loophole, from an article at The Bulwark:
ReplyDelete"The Tax Reform Act of 1976 established a comprehensive scheme governing the disclosure of tax information, mandating that in general tax returns “shall be confidential” and making unauthorized disclosure a felony.
"The statute included a handful of narrow exceptions, however, including one found at 26 U.S.C. § 6013(f), which allows congressional committees to request tax returns from the Treasury Department, of which the IRS is a part. Specifically, “upon written request from the chairman” of the House Ways and Means Committee or the Senate Finance Committee, the Treasury Department “shall furnish such committee with any return or return information specified in such request.” The law also allows the committee to give that information to the full House or Senate, meaning it gets placed in the Congressional Record—and thus made public.
"Although this provision is rarely used, Trump lost his argument in federal court that the statute somehow does not authorize the committee to publish the returns. In November, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to intervene, clearing the way for the committee to finish the job it began back in 2019."
“"William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
ReplyDeleteHuh. Sounds like that’s exactly what happened.
While Trump's taxes are likely chock-a-block full of questionable practices, loopholes, and other bits of tax lawyer quasi-legality, I would be rather surprised if anything actually actionable is found.
ReplyDeleteAs for the former Kardashian in Chief, he honestly thrives on this sort of attention, as do his myrmidons and lickspittles. It gives validation to his ego trip that he's somehow super dangerous to all the ebil deep swamp critters.