Supreme Court debate over Trump's financial records points to mixed outcome

The highly anticipated Supreme Court arguments over President Trump’s efforts to block disclosure of his income tax returns and private financial records suggested Tuesday the possibility of a mixed outcome.

Moreover, several justices suggested there might be more work for lower courts to do, which could delay any turnover of the documents being sought by congressional Democrats and Manhattan’s district attorney until after November’s election.

The court’s conservative majority seemed far more critical of lawmakers’ demands, questioning whether approving the subpoenas issued by three congressional committees would open the door for a Congress ruled by one political party to make potentially harassing requests of a president from a different party.

What Congress proposes as a limiting principle — that the request must be tied to potential legislation — is really “no protection at all, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. struck a similar chord.“Your test is not really much of a test. It’s not really a limit,” Roberts told Douglas N. Letter, general counsel to the House of Representatives, who said the key was that the request was tied to potential legislation.

Letter had trouble coming up with an example of a legislative proposal beyond Congress’s reach, which one of Trump’s private lawyers pointed out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/12/trump-taxes-scotus-hearing-live/



I'm not a lawyer so correct if I'm wrong. Letter has had months to work on this. Shouldn't he have been able to come up with something better? Too bad Carey Dunne isn't the House lawyer. He was awesome.