What the hell ever happened with those taxes anyway?

But the point above is the one that still has me gobsmacked. Trump passed one of the biggest tax cuts in history, the bulk of which went to people exactly like himself and his family. And he didn't divest himself of any of his businesses. In other words he signed a law that almost certainly benefits him and and very few other people and we have no idea just how much money that put into his pockets. 

The House Ways and Means committee has the power to request anyone's returns and after inexplicable foot dragging by the Democrats the demand for Trump's is slowly wending its way through the courts.  It's instructive to recall why that law was passed in the first place. Let's just say they saw Trump coming a long time ago. I wrote about it a while back.

There were plenty of scandals among the presidencies before Richard Nixon and Watergate, but probably the most serious was the Teapot Dome scandal in 1924. It was a bribery scheme involving government officials taking payoffs to lease oil on public land. One of the ancillary scandals that emerged from that investigation was the suspicion that Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, who did not divest himself of his vast private holdings, was benefiting from his position. Congress was rightly concerned that the tax legislation Mellon was proposing was designed to benefit his personal interests So it demanded to see Mellon's tax returns and also determine if the IRS had given him special treatment.

Presidents had long had the right to access any citizen's tax returns, but as these scandals unfolded, Congress realized that this allowed for a cover-up. This led to the passage of a law that allows the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee and the Joint Committee on Taxation the ability to demand any tax returns from the Treasury Department. The idea was to equally match the power the executive branch had to access this information. There were some slight modifications to the law two years later but other than that it has remained on the books ever since.

The most significant use was during Watergate when the Joint Committee investigated Nixon's taxes and released them to the public. He had been suspected of substantially underpaying by wrongfully claiming charitable deductions after the law had been changed. The press turned up more suspicious tax evasion schemes as the months went on, with questions over whether he'd paid capital gains taxes on a land deal. Finally, the Providence Journal-Bulletin got hold of Nixon's returns for 1970 and 1971, which showed he had barely paid any federal taxes at all.

Knowing that Congress was going to evoke the law and obtain the rest of his tax returns, Nixon voluntarily turned them over and asked the Joint Committee to audit them and tell him how much he owed. He ended up paying back $465,000 in 1974. Failure to pay taxes was one of the two articles of impeachment against Nixon that didn't pass out of committee after nine Democratic members voted against it.

Since the Watergate investigations had revealed the president grossly abusing his power with the IRS, shortly after Nixon's resignation Congress passed a law that severely limited the president's access to IRS information and barred him from disclosing it to the public. But it left the 1924 law untouched.

All presidents and major party nominees since Nixon have released their tax returns. That is, until now. President Trump has still not released his, sporadically claiming that he will do it as soon as the IRS is finished "auditing" them. This is, of course, nonsense. Every year would not be under audit and, in any case, there is no law against releasing a tax return that's being audited. It's very likely that Trump is lying about this, since he lies about everything.