My previous post on the lame-duck Congress omitted a couple of very important priorities. Both can be accomplished without the Senate and without the dedication of high-value time on the House floor. House Democrats and their staffs will need to work overtime, but both of these issues can be handled entirely in House committees.
Finishing the January 6 Committee Work
The Select Committee needs to finish and publish their final report and make any appropriate criminal referrals to the Department of Justice. The committee should then forward every single piece of background information they have to the DoJ, regardless of whether or not it’s related to the criminal referrals. Some of the information they’ve gathered might be of assistance within other on-going DoJ investigations. If not, the information dump will at least piss off House Republicans… and that alone makes it worthwhile. If the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee also wants the raw materials, they should get the information dump as well.
It’s not worth this committee’s time trying to hold the Orange Guy in contempt of Congress for failing to honor their subpoena. He is in contempt, but that’s not the point. There are much bigger crimes that will be much easier to prosecute and the effort here would just waste valuable floor time in the House.
Handling the Orange Guy’s Tax Returns
It took a VERY LONG TIME but a recent Supreme Court decision finally marked the end of numerous appeals. The House just today received six years of the former president’s tax returns from the IRS.
The problem, of course, is that there’s just not a lot of time left to study them.
The rationale for the original ask was to allow the House Ways and Means committee to evaluate the effectiveness of current laws related to a President’s taxes. If a billionaire president pays no taxes, there are only two possibilities:
- If everything turns out to be perfectly legal, we need to:
- examine the laws, and
- change the laws.
- If there’s evidence of anything illegal, we need to:
- hold him accountable,
- find out if he used his office to break the law, and
- figure out why no watchdog caught it.
To that last point, current law requires that all presidential and vice presidential tax returns be audited. Were such audits conducted? What did they reveal? The NY Attorney General found evidence of obvious fraud, so why didn’t a federal audit reach a similar conclusion? Were the auditors influenced by the White House to look the other way?
Finding answers to these questions requires time. Democrats simply don’t have anywhere near the runway to thoroughly examine what are likely to be very complicated tax returns, conduct an in-depth investigation with appropriate hearings, and make any necessary criminal referrals to the DoJ. Republicans will most certainly bury the returns on January 3 if it’s left entirely to them.
So what should House Democrats do?
Legally, they “could” simply make the returns public to let everyone and their CPA have a crack a them. However, I personally believe that would be a huge PR mistake. Making the returns public would be seen as remarkably vindictive because, well, it would be. While such vindictiveness would be entirely justified, Democrats should take a higher road:
- The House Ways and Means committee should make a best-effort to dig through the tax returns in the limited time they have left and should publish a preliminary report outlining any issues they find. That puts the follow-up in Republican hands who will trip all over themselves excusing any obvious fraud conducted by the former president.
- Democrats should forward the returns to the Senate Finance Committee and let them conduct their own review in the next Congress. If the Senate subsequently decides to make the returns public, that’s their call.