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House Democrats have the power to obtain Donald Trump's tax returns, and at least one of them is pushing his party to quit dragging their feet.
“There’s no reason to delay anymore,” New Jersey Rep. Bill Pascrell told Huffington Post in an interview. “In fact, there’s every reason to act now.”
The chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, Massachusetts Rep. Richard Neal, has the legal authority to request any person's tax information from the Treasury Department. But Neal and other Democrats have argued that a more cautious go-slow approach is best and, more recently, Neal indicated that he wanted to wait until after special counsel Robert Mueller issued his report on the Russia probe.
That may have made sense last week, when multiple news outlets were reporting that Mueller's investigation was winding down. But Pascrell, who also sits on the Ways and Means panel, is growing impatient, especially in light of Michael Cohen's testimony about the hush money reimbursement payments Trump made to him. “I don’t believe we should wait for the Mueller report, with all respect to the chairman," Pascrell said. "If Trump wrote these payments off as a business expense, that would constitute fraud and his returns would show that."
Trump's taxes are sure to be chock-full of legal and political landmines. If they weren't, America would have seen them by now. What's almost equally as certain is that the Treasury Department isn't going to release those taxes to Congress without a fight—one that could take many months to resolve.
That's a battle that may as well begin sooner rather than later. In fact, 63 percent of voters said in December that House Democrats should be allowed to release Trump's tax returns. That poll and the midterms seem like a pretty strong mandate. Voters didn't elect Democrats to sit on their hands.