Plus, they had 2-years as the minority party in the House to prepare it. They had plenty of attorneys and plenty of time. It wasn’t like they were writing legislation. It should have been sent on January 3.
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Yes, and we’ve pointed all this out before.
Anyway, the question for Neal this evening is: Now what?
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What you’re missing in that is all of the behind-the-scenes stuff, much of wouldn’t get into the letter itself. General Counsel, in particular, would have played a large role, and provided background and the legal arguments to support the request, in light of expected pushback that it was for political retribution against the President.
Which takes us to, it wasn’t 3 months. Strike January off the fucking calendar because of the shutdown. You really can’t start any of these clocks until we had a functional government back, as that sucked everything out of the room.
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I’m afraid that I must disagree. The wording of the law is “Upon written request from the chairman…” A subpoena is technically a demand issued by the House of representatives (by the chairman acting on behalf of the committee under authorization provided by the House…) and would not meet the precise definition of the law. Thus, a written request was required first (and IMHO makes a subpoena superfluous – Neal should ask for injunctive relief based on the letter.)
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A subpoena attached to a cover letter would have been fine.
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Wasn’t there a month-long government shutdown or something, followed by weeks of republicans preventing committees from meeting by refusing to name their members? This isn’t the first time this troll has tried to blame democratic congressional leaders for delays caused by republicans. Don’t reward it.
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Nonsense. They had 2 years to get this letter ready. They had plenty of staff attorneys to work on it. There was no new information in it.
And while the government was shutdown, the Representatives were still working (allegedly) and getting paid.
Sure it is.
Given the shutdown, things have moved at a pretty steady pace.
Neal crafted the letter carefully, with input from staff attorneys, so that it would hew to the law and not be dismissable in court for being frivolous.
Now it goes back to court.
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We will either wake up the sleepy-heads or we won’t. If they were awake we would not be talking to ourselves in this manner…rather, we would be debating with each other on the best ways to counsel restraint.
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Courts have consequences, too. Especially with citizens who pay attention.
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actually, you don’t even need a legitimate legislative purpose, because its based on statutory language in the tax code that provides access merely upon written request without condition. Indeed, the current form of the statute was amended in the wake of Watergate, and removed the words “relevant and useful” from the statutory language.
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Both of them?
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Yes, actually it is.
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And then what? Congress has an inherent right to enforce a contempt charge, they can fine the person or jail them for The duration of the Congressional session, Congress has not done so since 1935, refer it to the Atty General, who probably decide not to charge the individual, or some local prosecuter, who may or may not decide to get involved.
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Thanks. I have filed your opinions away with all due care.
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Your condescending assholishness is duly noted.
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Now this I disagree with.
I’ve written about it several times before, quoting, among others, George Yin, former Chief of Staff to the Joint Committee on Taxation (one of the three committees authorized to request tax returns in the way Neal has done).
As George Yin puts it:
A committee disclosure [of someone’s tax returns] must be for a legitimate committee purpose. [Because] public disclosure of confidential information is more violative of privacy rights than the mere seizure of the same information by Congress, Congress’s right to disclose must be subject at a minimum to the same implicit condition applicable to its investigative power.
Yin is a professor of law and taxation at the University of Virginia and a former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation.
He is also the author of a relevant paper, ‘‘Preventing Congressional Violations of Taxpayer Privacy,’’ 69 The Tax Lawyer 103, 154-160 (2015). Here is the first paragraph of the paper:
This Article claims that the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee violated the law in 2014 when it voted (strictly along party lines) to release to the public the tax return information of 51 taxpayers. The Committee acted under the belief that an obscure tax law provision authorized its action. But the provision required the Committee to have a legitimate purpose for the disclosures, and – incredibly – it failed to satisfy this almost trivial, common-sense restriction.
So, in case you were wondering, Yin is not an excuser of Republican shenanigans.
Yes, in the quoted article Yin is talking about disclosure, but he makes the larger point elsewhere.
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Could not care less.
If you’d like to refute what I say, by all means do so; but telling me this:
Neal crafted the letter carefully, with input from staff attorneys, so that it would hew to the law and not be dismissable in court for being frivolous.
Is telling me nothing I hadn’t already considered.
Richard Neal was sworn in as the new Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means on January 3, 2019, upon the commencement of the 116th Congress.
He did not need Committee Approval to write this letter. By statute, it is the prerogative of the Chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means to request these returns.
But Neal was able to very quickly pass a bill that would prohibit the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system. It probably has nothing to do with the fact that Neal received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block, two tax preparation companies that lobbied hard against the creation of free tax filing systems.
Must have been the Republicans fault.
Follow the money.
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I couldn’t have said it better myself.
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