Supreme Court clears way for Trump tax returns to go to Congress
Former president Donald Trump speaks remotely during the Republican Jewish Coalition Annual Leadership Meeting in Las Vegas on Saturday. (David Becker/For The Washington Post)
The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for a congressional committee to examine Donald Trump’s tax returns, denying without comment the former president’s last-ditch effort to extend a legal battle that has consumed Congress and the courts for years.
The justices’ brief order means that the Treasury Department may quickly hand over six years of tax records from Trump and some of his companies to the House Ways and Means Committee.
There were no recorded dissents and, as is often the case in emergency applications, the court did not state a reason for denying Trump’s request to withhold the records.
Lawmakers have said they need Trump’s tax returns from his time in office, plus the year before his term and the year after for comparison, to help evaluate the effectiveness of annual presidential audits. Trump has argued that Democratic lawmakers are on a fishing expedition designed to embarrass him politically.
“It has been 1,329 days since our committee sought Donald Trump’s tax returns — almost as long as the American Civil War,” said Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-N.J.), chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on oversight. “And for 1,329 days, our request made under law has been delayed, obfuscated and blocked by Donald Trump and his adjutants in the government and the courts. … The Supreme Court is right to keep its nose out of this case.”
It was unclear when the Treasury Department will turn over the documents — a spokesman said only that the department would comply — but time is not on the side of Democrats who run the committee, who will cede control to Republicans in January as a result of the recent midterm elections.
But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., the justice designated to hear emergency orders from that court, stopped the release Nov. 1, requesting more briefing and giving the high court more time to act. Tuesday’s action dissolved that order.
The Supreme Court generally has been unreceptive to assertions from Trump — who is again running for president — that he should be allowed to keep records private and that he was immune to investigation while in office. The justices in 2020 upheld Congress’s right to subpoena that information as long as certain conditions were met; last year they declined to block the release of Trump’s financial records to New York state investigators.
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House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.). (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
Trump has nominated a third of the justices, and their 6-to-3 conservative supermajority has resulted in one of the most conservative Supreme Courts in decades. But his nominees have uniformly ruled against him in requests regarding his finances and attempts to withhold documents from congressional investigators.
In arguing against the release of the tax records, Trump’s legal team said the committee’s premise for seeking the information “has nothing to do with funding or staffing issues at the IRS and everything to do with releasing the President’s tax information to the public.”
Their filing adds: “If allowed to stand, it will undermine the separation of powers and render the office of the Presidency vulnerable to invasive information demands from political opponents in the legislative branch. Review is of the utmost importance, and the Court should preserve its ability to grant it — not just for one ‘particular President,’ but also for ‘the Presidency itself.’”
The references to a “particular President” and “the Presidency itself” are from a previous Supreme Court ruling involving the president’s authority over immigration. But this litigation is unique because Trump defied modern tradition for presidential candidates and occupants of the Oval Office by refusing to make his tax returns public.
