Supreme Court lets Trump run out the clock
In two major cases Thursday, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to avoid all legal scrutiny of his financial records and reaffirmed the principle that undergirds any democratic society: No one, not even the president, is above the law.
That’s the good news. It’s also the bare minimum Americans should expect. The bad news is that Trump has again figured out how to game the legal system to his advantage, to dance along the edges of the law that the rest of us are expected to abide by.
The bottom line is that Trump will almost certainly get to keep hiding his tax returns and his other financial records from the American people, who will be asked to decide in a matter of months whether to give him another term.
From the day he took office, Trump has governed as if democratic checks and balances are optional.
Nearly 250 years after another ruler’s abuses of power drove the American colonists to revolution, the lesson remains clear: We must always keep close watch on our leaders. In two separate decisions Thursday, the Supreme Court reminded Trump of that history, ruling 7-2 that he could not ignore subpoenas of his financial records from Congress and from a New York prosecutor.
The case concerned a subpoena for Trump’s tax returns issued by Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan district attorney, who appears to be investigating whether Trump and others broke campaign-finance laws before and during his presidency. Trump claimed “absolute immunity” from the subpoena. On that point, the justices shot him down unanimously.
In the other case decided Thursday, Trump v. Mazars, the court took on Trump’s argument that he did not have to answer to Congress. Last year, three separate House subcommittees subpoenaed Trump’s accounting firm and a bank for his family’s and his business’s financial records. The subcommittees said they needed those documents to draft laws relating to Trump’s possible foreign or domestic conflicts of interest, as well as to government ethics, banking and foreign interference in elections.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented from both rulings, although they agreed with the central point that the president does not have absolute immunity.
Still, the upshot of these rulings is that, while Trump is not legally immune from investigation, he is effectively immune from it. Rather than uphold the validity of the subpoenas, as the lower federal courts had done, the Supreme Court sent both cases back to the lower courts, giving Trump another chance to delay and come up with more arguments about why the American people should be kept in the dark.
The American people need to know as much as possible about their presidential candidates. They need to trust that the person they choose will put the nation’s interests ahead of his own. As long as Trump is president and can hide his vast web of finances, they will never be able to do so.
What is the solution? Trump won’t release his tax records voluntarily. The Internal Revenue Service, apparently, won’t look at them as required by law. Neither Congress nor a state prosecutor is likely to get them before the election.
The court’s rulings hold the line, at least — ensuring that presidents cannot simply disregard congressional oversight or criminal investigation. But the fact that it took nearly a full term in office for the courts to articulate such a fundamental constitutional truth, and that still Congress and the American people will be left wondering, is damning evidence that justice delayed is justice denied.
The New York Times