Trump tax returns become Democrats’ latest fishing expedition

Yes, Democrats want to start a new investigation into alreadyunder-investigation Trump-Russia allegations. And yes, they want to investigate Trump associates like Michael Cohen, Roger Stone and others. But by far the biggest thing Democrats want, now that they have the majority in the House, is to get their hands on the president’s tax returns.

House Democrats want to use a 1924 law that allows any one of three entities — the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee or the Joint Committee on Taxation — to demand that the Treasury Department turn over the returns of any individual.

The law has almost never been used. For the first 50 years of its existence, no one tried to get a president’s returns — although the law played a role in the fight over Richard Nixon’s finances — and in the years since Gerald Ford took office, presidents have voluntarily made their returns public. Until Donald Trump.

So now, Democrats propose that the entity they fully control — the Ways and Means Committee — force Treasury, parent agency of the Internal Revenue Service, to turn over the president’s returns.

What do they hope to find? What is remarkable is that even the most aggressive Democrats don’t seem to have a clear idea what they will find in the returns.

They’re just sure there must be something bad in there.

The former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has written of Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller that “Mueller does not have a crime he is investigating. He is investigating in hopes of finding a crime.”

That is what Democrats are planning with the president’s tax returns.

Some think — no surprise — that there’s a Russia connection. Other Democrats want the tax returns to see if Trump might have violated the “emoluments clause” of the Constitution. Still others want to see if Trump got a special break in the tax cut law he signed.

The tax returns — many House Democrats believe — will be a Rosetta Stone to Trump corruption.

There’s no doubt the law gives Ways and Means Chairman Rep. Richard Neal the power to demand the returns. That doesn’t mean Neal would get them right away; the Trump administration would surely raise legal objections that could tie the issue up in court.

“Our priority is to make sure the president of the United States is working in the national interest, that he is not motivated by some pecuniary interest or fear of compromise or actual compromise,” Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff said recently.

“What we’re interested in is: Does the president have business dealings with Russia such that it compromises the United States?”

Trump broke a 40-year tradition by not releasing his tax returns during the campaign or since. Now, there are bills in both the House and Senate that would require presidents, and party nominees for the presidency, to release their returns. But they’re not law yet, and might never be.

Whatever happens, there will likely be serious consequences if the Ways and Means Committee chooses to force the release of the president’s returns. For one, it will set a precedent for the House majority, in this case the Democrats, to go after the tax returns of individuals.

It is not hard to imagine that coming around to bite Democrats in the future.

Nevertheless, that is what Democrats appear to want. At a recent Ways and Means hearing into the issue of acquiring individual returns, Rep. John Lewis summed up the situation, and in the process said perhaps more than he intended: “This is not the end,” Lewis said.

“This is just the beginning.”