Cuomo’s Trump Bill of Attainder

[Dashinka 23,211]

This constant TDS coming from the Democrats is really getting scary. 

 

By

The Editorial Board

The Wall Street Journal

Updated May 8, 2019 7:17 p.m. ET

 

If Donald Trump’s claims of executive privilege are a threat to the Constitution, as his critics now claim, what are we to make of the unprecedented bill of attainder against Mr. Trump now moving through the New York Legislature? Every President in memory has claimed executive privilege, but New York Democrats want to hand over the state tax returns of one man, the U.S. President, to Congress.

 

Our friends at the New York Sun call this an act of “constitutional nihilism,” and they’re not overstating the point. Encouraged by Governor Andrew Cuomo, a Joe Biden man, the Albany Democrats are poised to pass legislation that would let the state tax commissioner release Mr. Trump’s tax return to one of three Congressional committees.

 

The Democrats figure they can thus leap in a single bound over the battle now taking place in Washington between Mr. Trump and the House Ways and Means Committee over Mr. Trump’s federal returns. They’re also leaping over the Constitution.

 

The Albany Democrats claim they aren’t targeting Mr. Trump because their bill would let the tax commissioner release any individual’s New York tax return to Congress. This is hardly consolation. Mr. Cuomo and such altar boys as former Gov. Eliot Spitzer would have the power to turn over the returns of any political enemy. And once in the hands of Congress, they might as well be posted on Broadway.

 

Yet everyone knows that the immediate target here is one man, Mr. Trump. The rest is political cover. Why write the law now if not to assist Washington Democrats in harassing the President they loathe?

The ban on bills of attainder—laws targeting an individual—is as clear a constitutional principle as any in the great American charter. Article 1, Section 10 states that “No State shall . . . pass any Bill of Attainder.” The Founders wrote the passage to prohibit abuses that were common in England.

 

If Democrats want to go down this road, they should be ready for the boomerang. Both parties can use tax disclosure as a political weapon, and the Albany precedent will be repaid in kind by a Republican state legislature against a future Democratic officeholder. Recall that during the 1992 campaign Bill and Hillary Clinton hid Hillary’s implausible cattle-futures trading windfall in their undisclosed tax returns.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomos-tax-bill-of-attainder-11557356009

 

 

[TBoneTX 43,021]

Wonder whether any Federal judge in California or Hawaii will put a hold on this...