Office Hours: Are you concerned about a hyper-partisan Congress having access to your tax returns?

If so, what guardrails should be put in place?

Friends,

The House Ways and Means Committee has voted to make public six years of Trump’s tax records. If you’re like me, you’ve been waiting six years for Trump’s tax records to be released. Every president from Richard Nixon onward voluntarily released his tax returns annually, except Trump.

But the committee’s decision does at least raise a question whether in this era of hyper-partisanship Democrats have created a precedent for the potential use of tax returns as political weapons. We’re only weeks away from Republicans being in charge of the House and Kevin McCarthy, seeking to become Speaker, is making deals with the far-right “freedom forum” for committee assignments. So it’s not unimaginable that someone like Jim Jordan or Marjorie Taylor Greene could become chair of the Ways and Means Committee.

Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, currently the top Republican on the committee, said in a statement that “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.” He was warning against releasing Trump’s tax returns but he might as well have been predicting the behavior of the House under Republican control.

So today’s Office Hours question: Are you concerned about a hyper-partisan Congress having access to private tax returns — including, potentially, your own? If so, what guardrails, if any, should be enacted to guard personal privacy and prevent abuses of power?

Thanks for your lucid and thoughtful comments. Let me weigh in: No question that Trump should have disclosed and that the IRS and the Ways and Means Committee were correct in releasing them.

The scandal isn't only that Trump refused to release them, or that they're likely to reveal outrageous things (such as questionable tax gambits and transactions with foreign powers). It's that Trump's Treasury Department did not even audit them, as the Trump White House led Americans to believe.

I agree with those of you who say Republicans are feigning outrage about the release. But I do believe that when they take the reins, they will try to use the release as a pretext and precedent for reviewing and releasing the tax returns of political enemies — which is why we need firm guardrails to protect against this, such as the requirement of a court order.