In case you haven't heard, every president since Nixon has released their tax returns. They are already available.Not true. Oversight is not an enumerated power of Congress but an implied power of Congress, implied by the need to see how govenment agencies are functioning in order to carry out Congress's legislative function, and access to the President's taxes is in no way going to aid Congress in its legislative function. This will go to the courts after the Democrats do their little dance over it and in 3 or 4 years the Supreme Courts will issue its decision and you will see I am right.This is not the same situation. The IRS, an agency of the federal government is the custodian of Trump's tax return. It can be shared with any agency, department, or division of the government as long as rules of privacy are present and adhered to. Such rules exist in congress and laws are in place to protect privacy. These is no data in any federal agency that can be withheld from congress, even classified information, again as long as security precautions are in place.Now you're getting somewhere. Before the police can search your private papers and effects, it first has to be ascertained that a crime was committed, and a credible reason must be presented to a judge in order to get a search warrant. They cannot simply, on the word of a neighbor who's mad that you beat him out for president of the local HOA, search your house looking evidence of a possible crime. Thus, in this case, they should first get from the IRS the procedures in place for handling presidential tax returns, THEN ask for returns that can be checked against those procedures to be sure the IRS is following them. And if they were really concerned with oversight, they would demand returns from multiple presidents, not just Trump. The fact that they're ONLY interested in his returns blows their rationale out of the water.What could you ask them about his returns without seeing them?It would make more sense to ask the questions of the IRS, then have them bring out presidential returns for the last 20 years or so to illustrate their processes. Nothing ever revealed to the public, of course. No need to.
But it's obvious oversight had nothing to do with their ultimate goal.
The fact that they're insisting on only seeing Trump's returns makes it a partisan hunt. They didn't even pretend to go after multiple presidents' returns.