'Almost impossible to overstate how appalling' Trump's arguments are in Supreme Court case

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/12/trumps-lawyers-just-made-appalling-arguments-supreme-court/

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In the lower court rulings as these cases (and others in which Trump has made similar sweeping claims of immunity) make their way up to the Supreme Court, Trump hasn’t just lost. Again and again, judges expressed shock and even outrage at the audacity of his claims before rejecting them out of hand.

Consider the first two cases the Supreme Court heard together, the ones involving congressional subpoenas for his tax returns. The position Trump’s lawyers have taken is essentially that Congress didn’t have a good enough reason to exercise its subpoena power, and therefore the subpoenas are invalid — even though they’re directed at outside companies.

Again and again before the high court, Trump’s lawyers used the word “harassment” to describe Congress’s requests, claiming they had no legitimate legislative purpose. That’s despite the fact that the House explicitly cited their legislative purpose: They need to know what kinds of conflicts of interest Trump has to see if the country’s ethics laws need to be strengthened, not to mention figuring out whether legislation ought to be passed requiring presidents to release their tax returns.

But no, Trump’s lawyers said. That’s not good enough, because what they’re really doing is trying to harass him. It’s just political, and because he’s president, he can shield his personal records from their view.

As Justice Elena Kagan noted, Trump would “essentially make it impossible for Congress to perform oversight and carry out its functions where the presidency is concerned.”