EDITORIAL: Release of Trump taxes a belated win for political norms
Dec. 22—"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." That 1887 axiom from Lord Acton has stood the test of time.
Nowhere is there more power than in the Oval Office, the seat of the chief executive of the greatest military and economic power in world history.
Which is why Americans should applaud this week's decision by the House Ways and Means Committee to release the tax returns of Donald J. Trump, the 45th president of the United States with ambitions to return to that status.
Presidents and serious presidential candidates had routinely and universally released their returns for decades, a practice that began after Spiro Agnew, vice president under Richard Nixon, was found to have been taking bribes and kickbacks for decades, even accepting payments for favors done as a county executive years later in his vice presidential office.
Trump was the sole exception to that practice. The self-styled real estate tycoon, veteran of repeated bankruptcies and center of a tangled and obscured financial web, said during his 2016 run that he would release his tax returns but reneged on that promise. He spent years trying to block the IRS from following the clear letter of the law, which requires the agency to turn over any individual return requested by the chairs of the congressional tax committees.
That legal battle is over, and Trump's returns were provided to the Ways and Means committee a few weeks ago. On Tuesday that committee voted, on party lines, to issue a report on the contents of those returns.
Rep. Kevin Brady, the lead Republican on the committee, warned that this represents a "dangerous new political weapon." If it is a political weapon, it has an exceedingly narrow range of targets — elected officials and candidates who desire to hide their financial data. It is not a weapon that can be fired at, for example, President Joe Biden; his tax data have long been released.
Trump, both as candidate and as president, has repeatedly assaulted our political norms. Violating the tradition of revealing personal financial data is not the least of those assaults.
It should not have been necessary to force that degree of openness on him, but it was. He wanted the power and the secrecy; nobody should have them both.
