Trump asks Supreme Court to block Congress getting his tax returns

Former President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court on Monday to intervene in a case in which the IRS was ordered to give years of his income tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee.

The request that Chief Justice John Roberts block the committee from getting the tax returns, for now, came after Trump lost an attempt to reverse the judicial order at a federal appeals court.

“This case raises important questions about the separation of powers that will affect every future President,” Trump’s lawyers said in their emergency application.

The lawyers asked the court to issue a stay of an appeals court ruling against Trump on the tax returns by Wednesday, allowing time for him to ask the Supreme Court to hear an appeal of the ruling. But the lawyers also said the Supreme Court could construe Monday’s filing as a petition for such an appeal, and agree to take the case.

The filing accuses the committee in its request of get his tax returns solely for the purpose of releasing them to the public, and not, as the committee has stated, as a review of IRS audits of presidents.

If the Supreme Court grants Trump’s application, it could thwart the Democratic-controlled committee from receiving the returns for several more years — at the very least.

A Supreme Court case challenging the order could take months or longer to resolve.

And if Republicans regain majority control in the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, before the Supreme Court case is resolved, they are expected to end the Ways and Means Committee’s three-year-long bid to get Trump’s tax returns.

That committee has sought Trump’s tax records and those of related business entities as part of an investigation of how the Internal Revenue Service audits presidential tax returns. The IRS, which is a division of the Treasury Department, is legally mandated to audit the annual tax returns of sitting presidents.

The committee sued to obtain Trump’s federal returns for the years from 2015 through 2020 after then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin refused to comply with the committee’s request. The Trump appointee Mnuchin said that the panel did not have a legitimate legislative purpose.

Last December, Washington, D.C., federal court Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by Trump, ruled that the Treasury Department had to turn over the tax returns as requested. McFadden said that even if the committee’s request was politically motivated, as Trump has argued, its chairman had stated a “valid legislative purpose” in seeking the returns, as the law required.

Trump then appealed McFadden’s ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In August, a three-judge panel on that appeals court unanimously ruled against Trump.

The panel noted that while tax returns are generally confidential…