-
- November 23, 2022
[ad_1]
Thanksgiving 2022 was never going to be a happy time at Mar-a-Lago, what with the shellacking of Donald Trump’s preferred candidates in the midterms, the not-so-gushing response from Republicans to the ex-president’s 2024 announcement, and the public abandonment of the former guy by both his favorite offspring and billionaire Aussie. But now—in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to kill Trump’s last-ditch attempt to keep his tax returns (yes, the one he’s spent years trying to keep under lock and key) out of Congress’s hands—it’s likely to be extra grim.
Yes, on Tuesday, just one day after Joe Biden pardoned turkeys Chocolate and Chip, and 36 hours before what we assume is an annual tradition of the Mar-a-Lago kitchen staff opening the door to the walk-in freezer and finding Don Jr. spooning a frozen bird, the high court rejected Trump’s final bid to block the release of six years of his tax returns to the House Ways and Means Committee, which first requested them from the Treasury Department back in 2019.
Last month, a federal court declined the ex-president’s request to reconsider an August ruling that the committee could obtain them, and also refused to stop their transmission while Trump appealed to SCOTUS. Days later, chief justice John Roberts temporarily halted the release of the records, asking for more time for the court to consider the case. And while that might have given Trump some hope SCOTUS was on his side, that hope was dashed today.
Adding insult to injury, as The Washington Post notes, “there were no recorded dissents” in the court’s order, despite Trump having nominated three of the nine sitting justices. (While most presidents would not expect to be the beneficiary of a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours situation with the people he helped install on the court, we’d say the odds are high to extremely high that Trump was hoping for a quid pro quo deal.)
Though Trump’s lawyers insisted that he was—you guessed it—the victim of a political witch hunt, and that congressional Democrats could not be trusted with his tax returns, virtually everyone in the judicial branch has been unmoved. When ruling in August, the appellate court noted that, given how virtually every president in the last few decades has voluntarily released his returns, the committee’s request for Trump’s was “minimally intrusive.” It was also apparently unconcerned about Trump’s fears of his returns becoming public, writing: “Congressional investigations sometimes expose the private information of the entities, organizations, and individuals that they investigate. This does not make them overly burdensome. It is the nature of the investigative and legislative processes.”
Anyway, expect several cans of cranberry sauce to be sprayed across the wall of Mar-a-Lago in an angry rage tonight. (Yes, it’s usually ketchup, but seasonal appropriateness and all that jazz.)
The White House press corps remains extremely salty about not getting an invite to Naomi Biden’s wedding
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
Fact-check: Actually, have a pretty good idea
Twitter content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
[ad_2]
Source link
