Today’s Supreme Court decision in Trump v. Mazars (the one on Congressional requests for Trump’s tax returns, decided the same day as but separately from the Trump v. Vance case on NY state grand jury subpoenas thereof) sends that case back down to lower courts to apply four (or more) factors, starting with “whether the asserted legislative purpose warrants the significant step of involving the President and his papers.” The underlying thought, explained elsewhere in the opinion, can be paraphrased as follows: “Sure, Congress writes tax laws and oversees the IRS. It must be able to see tax returns to perform its legislative and oversight functions. But Congress isn’t seeking THIS taxpayer’s returns as some kind of random tax returns sample. It’s seeking them because this taxpayer is the President. So the District and Circuit courts to which we’re remanding this case need to evaluate whether Congress’s stated reasons for wanting to see these particular returns tie sensibly to legitimate Congressional functions. And Congress’s impeachment function, while legitimate, doesn’t count here, because both sides agreed that impeachment inquiry was not the basis for this request.”
Seems to me there’s a solid and straightforward way to show a sufficient basis for these requests. Under the US Constitution’s “Foreign Emoluments Clause,”art. I, § 9, cl. 8, “[N]o 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.”
Overseeing whether the President is complying with the Foreign Emoluments Clause is squarely a Congressional power. The Clause refers to “the Consent of the Congress,” and is part of Article I, which establishes and defines Congressional powers. So it is clearly a legitimate legislative purpose (and one not limited to the impeachment context) for Congress to investigate whether Mr. Trump, while serving as the President, has accepted a “present” or “Emolument” without requesting Congressional consent. And among the first documents any rational investigator of that question would want to see would be Mr. Trump’s tax returns for 2017 forward. Moreover, his tax returns for years before 2017 would be relevant to understanding his Presidential-term income.
As the decision recites (at 5) but does not discuss, “Chairman Cummings asserted that the Committee had “’full authority to investigate’ whether the President… (3) ‘is complying with the Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution.’”
I think Trump has no good answer to this argument. Congress and its attorneys might consider carving it out for rapid resolution.