“Ways and Means Democrats are unleashing a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond President Trump and jeopardizes the privacy of every American,” Rep. Kevin Brady, the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement. “Going forward, partisans in Congress have nearly unlimited power to target political enemies by obtaining and making public their private tax returns to embarrass and destroy them.”
In case that threat wasn’t clear enough, he added: “This is not limited to public officials, but can target private citizens, business and labor leaders and Supreme Court justices.”
Here’s the thing: Congress has had that power. No new law has been made to allow the House Ways and Means Committee to get Trump’s tax returns. But the existing law has only been used in extraordinary circumstances, like, say, a sitting president with extensive foreign business dealings, or the wealthiest president in U.S. history signing a tax law giving people like himself a large tax cut … or both of those things at the same time.
Democrats are not threatening to use this long-existing power against public officials in general or private citizens at all. That’s Republicans, and it’s not a tit for tat. It’s “If you do this one thing, we will do another different and much worse and much less justified thing and claim it’s because you did the first thing.”
But guess what! That’s going to happen no matter what. Democrats can’t prevent it by being too fearful to take action on Trump’s tax returns.
House Republicans have already made clear that they will be making things as ugly as possible in the name of “investigations.” House Oversight Committee Republicans already have a page dedicated to “Biden Family Investigation,” and when Republicans are feeling frisky, they go with “Biden crime family.” Nothing Democrats can do is going to make it better or worse. Abuse of power is already the Republican way, and Democrats using power appropriately to address a small part of Donald Trump’s abuses, with the blessing of the Trump Supreme Court, is simply not comparable. By allowing Republicans to pretend it is, the Times is both saying that anything Democrats do to hold Trump or any other powerful figure accountable is illegitimate and that anything Republicans do that they claim is in response to what Democrats did is understandable. It’s the toxic product of decades of Republicans blasting the “liberal media” and outlets like the Times going from bending over backwards to prove it isn’t so, as they did in years past, to now contorting themselves into knots to prove it isn’t so, with Republicans constantly raising the bar for how distorted and counterfactual the coverage would have to be for the attacks to cease.
There are valid and legitimate reasons for House Democrats to release information about Trump’s tax returns or even the returns themselves (appropriately redacted), as they are weighing in a Tuesday meeting. That’s because Trump’s public role and reasons for suspicion about his private profit are matters of national concern. There are no valid and legitimate reasons for Republicans to threaten to release the tax returns of private individuals merely because those people are their political opponents. To pretend the two things are in any way comparable is outrageous.
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