Meehan votes against seeking Trump tax returns

He believes they should be made public by Trump

WASHINGTON >> U.S. Rep Pat Meehan, R-7, was among 20 Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee who rebuffed an attempt by Democrats to get a look at President Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Breaking with modern presidential tradition, Trump has steadfastly refused to release his tax returns and it was an oftdebated issue during last year’s presidential campaign.

According to Meehan spokesman John Elizandro, “Congress-

man Meehan believes the president should have released his tax returns during the campaign, and continues to think he should release them.”

However, while making that information public may be the right thing to do, Meehan believes the attempt by Democrats to do it through the Ways and Means Committee is the wrong way to go about it.

Meehan “doesn’t believe members of the House Ways and Means Committee should be in the business of choosing whose tax returns should or should not be public. Setting such a precedent would put the privacy of everyday American taxpayers at risk and subject to the political whims of Congress,” Elizandro wrote in an email response to a query by Digital First Media.

“The Ways and Means Committee’s authority to gain access to taxpayer returns

is an oversight rule, created to enable the committee to carry out its legislative responsibility to make sure the IRS is treating taxpayers fairly,” Elizandro continued. “It’s a tool to be used to protect taxpayers, not to make their information available to the public.”

The chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is among several officials who can request tax returns from the Treasury Department under federal tax law.

The vote, taken Feb. 14, was on an amendment offered by U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas, directing that the committee chairman request the last 10 years of Trump’s tax returns from the IRS to be “made available for examination by bipartisan committee staff and, additionally, in executive session by all committee members.”

The rationale, according to the amendment, was to allow the committee to review “potential conflicts and violations of the emoluments

U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan “doesn’t believe members of the House Ways and Means Committee should be in the business of choosing whose tax returns should or should not be public.” —John Elizandro, Meehan spokesman

clause (of the Constitution), and potential entanglements with foreign governments and foreign state-owned enterprises.”

The emoluments clause in the Constitution says that “no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under [the United States], shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

According to the conservative Heritage Foundation, “the delegates at the Constitutional Convention specifically designed the (emoluments) clause as an antidote to potentially corrupting foreign practices of a kind that the Framers had observed during the period of the Confederation.”

The examples given include kings giving expensive gifts to American foreign ministers.

Some have argued that the extensive foreign holdings of Trump’s business organization, as well as ownership of a new Washington, D.C. hotel, create the environment for foreign leaders to attempt to influence the White House through patronage of these enterprises.

Last month, according to the Washington Post, the liberal government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed a lawsuit arguing the President had already violated the clause “because Trump-owned

buildings take in rent, room rentals and other payments from foreign governments.”

The clause has never been tested in court.

According to a Feb. 14 article on The Hill news site, Democratic lawmakers “said that reviewing Trump’s tax returns is important for national security, in light of national security adviser Michael Flynn resigning following reports that he misled White House officials about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador.”

They also argued it is important to know how the president’s finances might be affected by any tax reform measures Congress considers.

Since taking office, Trump has announced that he has transferred control of his businesses to his sons Eric and Donald Trump Jr., although critics question the degree to which the president has distanced himself from control of his many enterprises.

In addition to Meehan, one other Pennsylvania Congressman, Mike Kelly

of western Pennsylvania’s third district, also voted against seeking Trump’s tax returns in the Feb. 14 vote.

The oddly-shaped seventh district includes municipalities in north and western Chester County as well as Berks, Bucks, Delaware and Montgomery counties.

There are no Pennsylvania Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.

It is not the first time the effort to see Trump’s tax returns has been made in that committee.

New Jersey Democrat Bill Pascrell sent committee chairman Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, a letter earlier this month asking him to request the returns from Treasury so that the committee could review them in a closed meeting and consider whether they should be made public, according to The Hill.

Brady told reporters he would not request the returns, saying that the committee wouldn’t weaken taxpayers’ privacy rights, The Hill reported.

U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan, R-7