Judge To House Dems: No, You Can’t Speed Up Lawsuit For Trump’s Tax ReturnsAre House Democrats feeling pressure to speed up their attempts to find dirt on Donald Trump? If so, the federal court most certainly is not. Judge Trevor McFadden shot down attempts by the House Ways and Means Committee in its lawsuit over Trump’s tax returns to both get a summary judgment against the president and to expedite the case yesterday:
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McFadden, perhaps sensitive to the potential of his appointment by Trump being used to criticize his decision, offered a broad spectrum of reasons for keeping this lawsuit on a normal track. First, a request for expedited treatment should have been made when the suit was filed, not nearly two months later. McFadden noted that the time hasn’t even elapsed for Trump to file motions in response to the original complaint, too, as well as the fact that Congress sets up specific circumstances for expedited treatment — and this case doesn’t fall into those categories.
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McFadden most importantly notes that interbranch disputes such as these deal with important and complicated constitutional issues. Cases impacting the balance of power between co-equal branches should not be lightly handled:
But in inter-branch disputes like this one, “[t]he Separation of Powers often impairs efficiency, in terms of dispatch and the immediate functioning of the government.†Id. Indeed, “t is the long-term staying power of government that is enhanced by the mutual accommodation required by the Separation of Powers.†Id. Such considerations and other factors counsel against rushing to judgment here.
This case presents novel and complex questions about the privileges and authority of all three branches of the federal government. “Few ideas are more central to the American political tradition than the doctrine of separation of powers.†U.S. House of Representatives v. Mnuchin, 379 F. Supp. 3d 8, 10 (D.D.C. 2019). The Committee asks the Court to wade into a dispute between the political branches about disclosing the President’s personal financial information over his objections.
Putting it simply, the Dems are working a political game, a fishing expedition with a time fuse of Election Day, 2020. Their scheme requires having Trump's tax returns in time for them to pretzellate information from it into some sort of frivolous but serious-sounding accusation of fraud close enough to Election Day that Trump's response can't be heard as widely as the accusation. Judge McFadden has let the Dems know that their time fuse does not create urgency in his handling of the case.
As a side note, I searched the Judge's name to see if this story had been posted before. It hadn't as best I could tell, but evidently Judge McFadden has ruled against the Dems in several of their anti-Trump cases.
