Former U.S. President Donald Trump makes a fist while reacting to applause after speaking on the North Carolina GOP convention dinner in Greenville, North Carolina, June 5, 2021.
Jonathan Drake | Reuters
The IRS and the Treasury Department on Thursday urged the Supreme Court against blocking a lower court ruling requiring the agencies to show over years of former President Donald Trump’s federal tax returns to Congress.
The IRS and Treasury in a legal temporary said that Trump’s emergency request for a delay “cannot satisfy the demanding standard for that extraordinary relief.”
Shortly after that filing, the House Ways and Means Committee, which is looking for Trump’s records, filed its own temporary asking the Supreme Court to disclaim Trump each further delay, and his request that the court hear his appeal of lower court rulings against him within the case.
“Further review from this Court is unwarranted, so there necessarily isn’t any basis to issue emergency relief pending appeal,” lawyers for the Democratic-controlled committee wrote.
The filings got here nine days after Chief Justice John Roberts issued a short lived block on the committee getting the tax returns of Trump and related business entities from the IRS.
Roberts’ motion got here after Trump sought the delay pending the high court ruling on whether he can be allowed to appeal a lower court order allowing the committee to get the tax records.
The Ways and Means Committee has said it wants the returns from the Treasury Department as a part of a probe of how the IRS audits presidential taxes. Presidential tax returns are mechanically audited every year by law.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t maintain the block, the committee could get the returns soon.
The previous president has lost legal efforts in federal court in Washington, D.C., and on the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia to forestall the committee from getting the records.
Trump, who as a candidate and occupant of the White House broke a long time of precedent by refusing to publicly release his tax turns, then asked the Supreme Court to listen to his appeal.
The high court doesn’t mechanically grant such requests. If it denies Trump’s request, that may clear the best way for Ways and Means to get his tax returns.
Within the filing Thursday, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, acting because the lawyer for Treasury and the IRS, wrote that the federal appeals court “appropriately held” that the request for the tax records by the committee’s chairman provided a “legitimate legislative purpose.”
Prelogar noted that Trump’s lawyers have argued that the appeals court must have looked beyond that stated purpose, and thought of evidence that the request for the records was “also motivated by political considerations.”
“But for nearly a century, this Court has refused to entangle the judiciary in such inquiries into ‘the motives alleged to have prompted’ a congressional request that’s otherwise supported by a sound legislative purpose,” the solicitor general wrote.
