On Monday, former US President Donald Trump requested the Supreme Court stop an order requiring the IRS to hand over several years of tax returns to a Congressional Committee.
On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts gave him an answer.
Trump filed an emergency appeal on Monday, requesting the Supreme Court give an order for a temporary hold on the IRS turning over his financial records to the House Ways and Means Committee.
Trump’s request to delay the Committee from getting their hands on his tax returns comes a few days after a federal appeals court ruled against his attempts to reverse the order.
In their emergency application to The Chief Justice, Trump’s lawyers said that the case had raised critical questions about the separation of powers bound to affect every US president in the future.
Trump’s legal team said that the handover of the tax returns was scheduled to be carried out on Thursday and asked the court to intervene in the matter by Wednesday to delay the handover.
Trump’s filing claims that the House Ways and Means Committee wants to get its hands on Trump’s tax returns so they could publish them publicly and that they have a political motivation. The committee consists of mostly Democrats.
In his order, Chief Roberts told the lawyers for the congressional committee, which has been trying to get the returns since 2019, that they have to file a response to Trump’s claims by November 10. It is speculated that the Supreme Court will rule on the case.
The delay benefits Trump, especially with the upcoming midterm elections. If Republicans take back control in Congress before the case is solved, it could end the three-year-old bid by the Ways and Means Committee to get Trump’s tax returns.
The Congressional Committee led by its chairman, Richard Neal from Massachusetts, first requested to view Trump’s returns in 2019 while investigating the IRS’s audit program and former President Trump’s compliance with tax laws.
The IRS is legally required to audit the tax returns of presidents, and federal law says that the IRS can give the returns of any taxed citizen to some top legislators.
At first, former Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin, decided to withhold then-President Trump’s tax returns from Congress, a decision that the Justice Department supported during Trump’s tenure.
After President Biden took office in 2021, the Committee decided to renew the request and sought Trump’s returns for the four years he was president, from 2015 to 2020. The request was approved by the White House and the Biden administration asked the Treasury Department to comply with the request. Since then, Trump has filed numerous suits and appeals in court trying to stop the handover.
Trevor McFadden, a Federal Court Judge in Washington DC and a Trump appointee, ruled last December that the IRS was obligated to hand over the requested returns to the House committee. He said that even if it was true that the committee’s reasons were political, the chairman had presented valid legislative reasons for asking for the returns.
All other judges who rejected Trump’s request in his appeals gave the same opinion, saying that the committee had a legitimate legislative reason for their request.
