House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal (L) and Republican Representative of Texas Kevin Brady (R) attend as the House Ways and Means Committee votes to release former President Trump’s tax to the public on Dec. 20.
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President Trump’s Democratic critics have broken another political norm, and it’s a big one. On Tuesday the House Ways and Means Committee voted to release six years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns. Chairman
Richard Neal
claims this is oversight of an IRS rule to always audit the President, but it’s a flimsy pretext.
The Chairman of Ways and Means has power under the law to look at private taxpayer data but must demonstrate a legitimate legislative purpose. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump refused to release his tax returns, and we criticized him for it. The voters elected him anyway. But the left kept clamoring, and after cycling through unconvincing arguments to take a peek, Democrats landed on the obscure IRS presidential audit program. Mr. Trump resisted, and Mr. Neal finally won in court last month.
The rushed 25-page report Democrats released Tuesday says the IRS is required to conduct “mandatory” audits of presidential returns, but it says the IRS waited until 2019 to designate for review only one of Mr. Trump’s individual returns (tax year 2016). It intimates that this was due to political pressure: “Clearly, the mandatory audit program was dormant, at best, during the prior Administration.”
Yet by the report’s own admission, the IRS has nothing more than a policy (adopted in the 1970s) that a President’s income tax returns are “subject to mandatory examinations.” The IRS manual says nothing about the timing or scope of these reviews. Mr. Neal targeted only Mr. Trump, so it’s impossible to say if the IRS did anything unusual. Real oversight would compare its actions over several presidencies.
The fine print of Mr. Neal’s report…
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