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Illinois state senate legislators Thursday (April 11) publicly removed all possible doubts whether they are blithering, sniveling, whining, petulant idiots.
They are.
There is absolutely no question in my military mind.
Illinois Democrats approved a bill that would require presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns if they want their names to appear on the state’s ballot. In other words, if Present Trump wants his name on the ballot in Illinois in 2020, he would have to first cough up five years of his income tax returns to Illinois Demorats.
New York state legislators introduced a similar bill on Monday. New York would authorize the state’s tax commissioner to release state tax returns to Congress upon request. The legislation, if passed, would enable the release of Trump’s state returns, since he is a New York resident and the state is home to his corporate businesses.
Illinois Senate Bill 145, introduced in January by State Sen. Antonio Muñoz, would require any candidate for president or vice president to release the most recent five years of their tax returns to have their name on the general election ballot.
“Voters have a right to know a presidential candidate’s conflicts of interests,” Muñoz said in a statement on his website. “They have reasonably expected this disclosure for decades, and if candidates won’t release the information willingly, then we need a law in place that requires it.”
The push from Illinois Democrats for President Donald Trump’s taxes ahead of the 2020 presidential election comes as several other states are pursuing similar legislation.
Since 2017, 18 state legislatures, including those in Illinois and New York, have introduced bills that would require presidential candidates to publicly disclose their tax returns to be on the ballot, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
House Democrats in Washington formally requested the President’s tax returns last week from the Internal Revenue Service, but Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin informed them on Wednesday that his department would be unable to comply with their deadline for Trump’s tax return.
Under the bill approved Thursday, the Illinois secretary of state would post the tax returns on its website, with the candidate’s personal information redacted. The bill would not apply to congressional or statewide candidates.
The measure was approved by the Illinois Democratic-controlled Senate, 36-19. The bill has moved to the Illinois House, where Democrats also hold the majority
Republican state Sen. Dale Righter questioned the bill’s constitutionality and called it “an embarrassing waste of the Senate’s time” on Thursday, the Capitol News Illinois reported.
Cokie Roberts, moderator of NPR’s “Morning Edition” said in a broadcast February 15, “It’s been standard from Nixon on for presidents and presidential candidates to let the public see what they’ve paid, but not everyone has handled it the same way. Gerald Ford, Nixon’s successor, provided a summary of his taxes. Some candidates have just turned over a couple of years’ worth of documents. Others have provided returns for many years.”
She noted that the tradition of presidential candidate making their income tax return public began with Richard Nixon. But she that Nixon did not volunteer to turn over his tax returns.
“Nixon didn’t initially turn over his returns voluntarily,” she said. “They were leaked by someone in the IRS.”
There is no law requiring a presidential candidate to make his or her tax returns public. And there certainly is no law requiring publicizing tax returns as a condition of having one’s name placed on an election ballot. Butdemocrats socialists might be able to force President Trump to give up his tax returns under a little known tax law from 1924.
According to Roberts, “The law that some House members want to employ to force the IRS to turn over Trump’s returns is a very obscure section of the tax code. And it allows the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee to demand any tax filer’s returns. It dates back to the Teapot Dome scandals of the 1920s, when members of the Harding administration were accepting bribes. Congress had to rely on the executive for financial information, so they made this law. It’s been rarely used. But the Republican members of the Ways Means Committee did employee it a few years ago when they were investigating what they called the IRS’ discrimination against conservative organizations.”
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I have an alternative suggestion. Let every demorat disclose all of their tax returns first—just to show good faith. Of course they won’t. They have no faith—good or otherwise.
Idiots.
~ Grif