We have long argued that President Trump owes it to the public to release his tax returns in the name of full transparency, the way every chief executive has done since Richard Nixon. The public should know how the person leading the nation earns his living.
This is especially true in the case of Trump. Never before has a president taken office with a more complicated web of financial entanglements. Voters should be able to assess whether any of them present conflicts of interest or potential avenues for corruption.
But whether Trump should voluntarily release his tax returns is a separate question from whether Congress has the right to make him do so. Although the Supreme Court on Thursday largely avoided the question by returning the matter to a lower court, the justices unanimously agreed that the Constitution limits congressional powers to obtain personal information on the president.
Congress is entitled to certain information as part of its oversight powers, but this is not a blank check to access whatever it wants.
In a 7-2 decision, justices vacated a lower court ruling in favor of House Democrats, arguing that “the courts below did not take adequate account of the significant separation of powers concerns implicated by congressional subpoenas for the President’s information.”
Although Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the decision, they argued that it actually did not go far enough. Thomas said that the lower court ruling should be reversed in full rather than simply remanded with instructions.
Either way, not a single justice, not even the liberal ones, bought House Democrats’ arguments that they needed the records to serve a legislative purpose. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote:
There is a risk, Roberts added, that “without limits on its subpoena powers, Congress could ‘exert an imperious control’ over the Executive Branch and aggrandize itself at the president’s expense, just as the Framers feared.”
Justices called upon the lower courts to weigh additional considerations — for instance, whether the legislative purpose in fact warrants such an extraordinary step as to force the president to turn over financial records. “Congress may not rely on the President’s information if other sources could reasonably provide Congress the information it needs in light of its particular legislative objective,” Roberts wrote.
In a related case, seven of the justices rightly rejected the Trump administration’s argument that the president has special immunity from inquiries into his finances by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance. Although Vance is operating from the same transparently cynical motives as his fellow Democrats in Congress, the seven justices in the majority on this case were right to point out that Trump is not special or above the law of the state where he technically resides. As the case syllabus notes, the Constitution does not “categorically preclude, or require a heightened standard for, the issuance of a state criminal subpoena to a sitting President.” This case, like the other, will now go back to a lower court.
Put another way, the issue surrounding Trump’s tax and financial privacy remains unsettled. But, on the way there, the justices did two good things. On the one hand, they recognized limits on Congress’s ability to obtain information. On the other, they placed limits on presidential immunity.
Those are both positive things, but don’t forget that we shouldn’t be in the position where courts are forced to decide them. Trump should just release his taxes voluntarily, the way everyone else does.
