Supreme Court permits handing over Trump's tax returns to Congress

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After a three-year legal battle, the Supreme Court on Tuesday gave the go-ahead for the impending delivery of former President Donald Trump's tax returns to a congressional committee.

The court denied Trump's request for an order that would have prevented the Treasury Department from providing the Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee with six years' worth of tax returns for Trump and some of his businesses. There were no notable dissents in the decision.

Trump was the only recent President to refuse to make his tax returns public during either his successful 2016 campaign or his four years in office, claiming that the IRS was conducting an ongoing audit. Trump declared he would run for office once more in 2024 last week.

The former President suffered his third Supreme Court defeat this year and his second in as many months. The legal dispute surrounding the FBI search of Donald Trump's Florida estate, which produced classified documents, was not taken up by the court in October.

The court declined to block the National Archives from providing records to the House committee looking into the Capitol uprising on January 6. The lone vote in Trump's favor came from Justice Clarence Thomas.

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During Trump's presidency, the Treasury Department refused to turn over the documents in the dispute over his tax returns. However, the Biden administration argued that it is clear from the federal law that the committee has the authority to review the tax returns of any taxpayer, including the President. 

Trump's arguments that the committee was overstepping its bounds and only wanted the records so they could be made public were rejected by lower courts, which agreed that the committee had broad authority to obtain tax returns.

Chief Justice John Roberts imposed a temporary freeze on November 1 to give the court time to consider the legal arguments made by Trump's attorneys, as well as the administration and the House of Representatives rebuttals.

Just over three weeks later, the court lifted Roberts’ order without comment.

Until the new Congress convenes in January, Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass. will serve as the committee's chairman. He said in a statement that his committee "will now conduct the oversight that we've sought for the last three and a half years."

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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The House argued that if the IRS couldn't provide the tax returns, there would be "little or no time" for lawmakers to finish their work during this Congress, which is rapidly coming to an end.

While Republicans prepared to take over the House in January, Trump could have put the committee out of business had he convinced the nation's highest court to get involved.

If the matter still hadn't been resolved by then, they almost certainly would have dropped the records request.

This comes after the US Supreme Court announced on November 1 that Donald Trump won a congressional request against a Democratic-led committee that demanded the former US President release all tax returns for the period of 2015 until 2020, a case that has been ongoing for the past three years. 

Trump then filed a final emergency appeal to the US Supreme Court to block the authorization.