Nancy Pelosi and her Democrat allies made a colossal mistake.
Democrats in Congress picked a major fight with President Trump and they expected to win a victory that would swing the 2020 election in their favor.
But now the Supreme Court is about to deal Nancy Pelosi this humiliating defeat.
There is no requirement that presidential candidates release their tax returns.
Donald Trump did not make his tax returns public during 2016, explaining they were under audit.
Fake news reporters and Democrats stomped their feet and yelled until their faces turned red, but the American people shrugged their shoulders and decided tax returns were not that big of a deal and elected Donald Trump as President.
After Democrats won back the House of Representatives, the House Ways and Means Committee exploited an obscure 1920s law that allowed the committee chairman to request the tax returns of any citizen in America.
House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters also subpoenaed financial institutions doing business with Trump and his company to turn over the President’s financial records.
The President sued, claiming these subpoenas were overly broad, served no legitimate purpose, were illegitimate because local district attorneys had no jurisdiction to investigate the President and were only designed to obtain financial information so the Democrats could leak it to the public during the election.
Democrats had won at the lower court level, but found themselves in for a big surprise upon reaching the Supreme Court.
Multiple justices – including both a liberal and conservative member of the bench – expressed hostility toward the Democrats’ argument.
“In your view, there’s no protection for the purpose of preventing harassment of a president,” conservative Justice Samuel Alito said to House Democrat General Counsel Douglas Letter.
“Your subpoenas are very broad and very burdensome on the Trump Organization. Far beyond tax returns. You are being dismissive of the burdens of these subpoenas,” Liberal Justice Stephen Breyer jabbed.
Fordham University Law Professor Jed Shugerman predicted the Democrats were headed towards a well-deserved defeat.
“I don’t know what to predict, but it seems clear that the Court will not rule broadly in favor of the House, and rightly so. The House pushed their luck with a super overly broad argument, and it *should* backfire. The question is how badly it will backfire,” Shugerman wrote.
Trump supporters cannot get too confident of victory, however.
On multiple occasions, Chief Justice Roberts gave the impression during oral arguments that he would side with conservatives only to pull an about-face and hand the left a victory by selling out to side with the court’s four liberal justices.
Roberts pulled this betrayal in the 2012 Obamacare case as well as the 2019 Supreme Court case where the left successfully challenged the Trump administration’s ability to add a question asking about citizenship to the 2020 census.
But in this case, the disgust with the Democrats’ tactics and arguments was so profound and bipartisan that it is hard to see how Nancy Pelosi and her allies will score a victory that lets them get their hands on the President’s tax returns for no legitimate reason.
Great American Daily will keep you up to date on any new developments in this ongoing story.
