So the U.S. Supreme Court wrapped up its term today with a big decision. It ruled 7-to-2 that New York prosecutor has the legal right to subpoena President Trump’s tax returns. A second decision said Congress doesn’t have that right, at least in this moment under these circumstances. At a high level, the court found the president of the United States does not have absolute immunity from investigation while in office.
In a 7-to-2 decision like you said, Chief Justice John Roberts basically determined that the grand jury in New York state had the ability to issue a subpoena for President Trump’s personal financial records, including almost 10 years of his tax returns. That rejected an argument from Trump’s personal lawyers and the solicitor general of the Justice Department that would have allowed Trump to basically use the White House as a shield for any of those requests for his personal information. And just to be clear, this is his personal stuff, not any kind of executive privilege-based materials or decision-making that he did in the White House. It’s his money stuff.
They were both decided by 7-to-2, both opinions written by Chief Justice John Roberts. The first decision, the one that says that presidents aren’t blanket immune, it involved the Manhattan district attorney.
The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, had issued a subpoena through a grand jury for almost 10 years of Trump’s financial records and tax returns. And they started this investigation after Michael Cohen, a familiar name, Trump’s former personal lawyer, testified to Congress that he had helped pay hush money to women during the 2016 campaign to keep them quiet as Trump was running toward the presidency. That led investigators to wonder what was going on with Trump – in the Trump Organization books and records, and so they wanted access to these materials. Today the Supreme Court said the grand jury is very likely to get them, basically said there is a public interest in fair and effective law enforcement that cuts in favor of access to evidence even when it’s concerning personal records of the president of the United States.
Still will be awhile before the documents are made public
That grand jury is still not likely to get these documents for a while. Under a grand jury process all of that material is super-secret. And it’s against the law to leak any of that stuff. So if you’re found leaking, you could be charged with a crime and put in the clink. That said, the majority decision basically said President Trump can still raise some other arguments, basically that these subpoenas are overbroad or there are other problems with them. But the ringing endorsement from this majority ruling is that the president is not above the law, and it’s quite likely this grand jury is going to get those materials, although maybe not before the November election.
Because on one hand, I’m seeing this and saying you can, and then you can’t. And Congress clearly has generally the power to investigate, to oversee. I was just amazed as I was reading this second ruling. It’s called Mazars after President Trump’s accounting firm. And Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority again, seemed like he was kind of walking through a minefield. He pointed out that the high court had never been asked to rule on a case like this, which is basically a tug-of-war or a wrestling match between the Congress and the White House over access to these kinds of materials. And he seemed to really not like it, this clash between rival branches of government, he said.
But basically, John Roberts laid out this new test that lawmakers Congress and congressional committees are going to have to go through to show that they really need some of these kinds of materials. And that might make it harder for Congress in the future to get some of these documents in a timely manner.
Justice Roberts appears to reigning in Congress
I guess that’s surprising to me because I feel like so many of the rulings coming out of the Roberts court, especially when they had to do with, you know, the administration issues, boil down to Congress has power to do things; if only it would do them. So here they seem to be saying, rein yourself in a little bit, Congress.
Tom Hungar, who had been the general counsel of the House of Representatives and earlier spent a lot of time in the solicitor general’s office, issued a statement today saying he thought this was a major strategy error by the House of Representatives and it would hurt congressional investigations moving forward.
He’s not happy. You know, he’s not happy with the way this – these decisions, you know, came out. He’s sent, like, you know, a flurry of tweets basically saying that, you know, he was being treated the way no other president is being treated. He said that normally presidents get deference, but not me – in all-caps. What you hear from the campaign is – what they are saying is President Trump has released a lot of documents about his financial records and so that this really doesn’t matter and that, you know, his personal lawyer Jay Sekulow was saying that they look forward to, you know, raising other constitutional issues at these lower courts to continue to fight this.
I think a big question is how President Trump handles this going forward and whether he’s going to let it go or whether he’s going to continue to talk about it. It seems likely, based on history, that he will continue to kind of gripe about it for a while.The president is frustrated with the court, but it was two of his nominees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who voted against him in that key case.
President Trump seeing Gorsuch and Kavanaugh as traitors
President Trump didn’t specifically mention Kavanaugh or Gorsuch. But we know that Trump looks at every – almost everything through a very personal lens. And you know, he often goes, I did this for you; you owe me some loyalty. So I can’t imagine that he is going to be happy that Kavanaugh and Gorsuch went against him on this. There was some talk when Kavanaugh was nominated that part of the reason that he was nominated was because of this idea that he would be more deferential to presidential powers. And – but that did not help him in this case.
Ahead of this ruling, there was a lot of talk about how it might fit into these past big Supreme Court moments, where the court ruled with unanimous majorities that presidential power is not unlimited.
I think it very much keeps in line with those decisions. The two that I’m most familiar with involve President Nixon and having to turn over some of the tapes that he made in the Oval Office. That was a unanimous decision from the high court. And then the second was during the Bill Clinton administration, the notion that he would be subject to a civil lawsuit over behavior that occurred before he was president of the United States. In both those cases, unanimous courts ruled that the president is a special person, but he can’t get away with having to answer for some conduct. And this opinion in the New York grand jury case very much fits in that line.
A lot of Democrats very much want to see President Trump’s tax returns. He was the first presidential nominee in more than a generation to never release them publicly. They’re still taking it as a win. You had former Vice President Joe Biden. Biden tweeted this video that he had done a while back, and the video basically says put out your taxes, Trump, or shut up. And you know – so he’s basically challenging Trump. And I think we can expect to see that going forward – more of that from him because Biden, of course, has released his taxes.
Pelosi said she’s willing to follow Supreme Court rulings
From Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, she basically said that, you know, they are going to take the standards that were put forth by the Supreme Court that Congress has to meet to, you know, get information to satisfy their subpoenas – that they feel like they can meet those standards and that they’re going to move ahead with trying to get this information. But like you said, it’s not going to happen before the election.
I feel like today’s ruling really underscores this theme of the close of this term, of Chief Justice John Roberts really seeming to try to make a political point that the court is not political and also, once again, underscoring the importance of the letter of the law. Well, you know, he had come out and said in the last couple of years that there are no such thing as Obama judges and Trump judges. And certainly, the lineup in today’s cases in particular, with respect to executive power and congressional oversight, would give some credence to his argument that you can’t always predict how a justice is going to vote based on the president who appointed them.
He handled some immigrants’ rights cases and abortion rights cases this year. He handled a bunch of other cases about civil rights. And he tried to walk a fine and narrow line. At some point, that’s going to get harder and harder to do in the future. I certainly know this. He’s a guy who’s in desperate need of a break right now. So it’s a good thing they’re on break for the summer.
The courts are such a big selling point for conservatives for President Trump. You know, he trumpets them all the time. He talks about all the judges appointed. He talks about Kavanaugh and Gorsuch.
President Trump still has a record that he can point to for appointing so many conservative judges. There were big wins, you know, even just this week on, you know, religious freedom, you know, when it came to contraception and things of that nature. So he does have things that he can point to and that I think conservatives can point to that they have gotten from the judiciary. And I think what they are looking at is a very long-term goal of remaking the whole judiciary and that this will come and pay dividends down the line.
So I think that’s an argument that he still has. And these issues, especially about the tax returns and stuff like that, was very specific to President Trump and to him as a candidate and not necessarily – I don’t think you can really extrapolate that to just a larger conservative ideology.
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