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The champion is Represenative Bill Pascrell, who sits on the Ways and Means Committee. He found that “a rarely invoked 1924 law could be used to examine President Donald Trump's tax returns for possible conflicts of interest and Constitutional violations,” USA Today reported. “The 1924 law gives congressional committees that set tax policy the power to examine tax returns. It was used in 1974 when Congress looked at President Richard Nixon's returns, and in 2014 when the Ways and Means Committee released confidential tax information as part of its investigation into the Internal Revenue Service's handling of applications for nonprofit status.”

This prompted Democrats on the committee to introduce an amendment Tuesday that would’ve triggered a request for the tax returns to the Treasury Department. “Unless this amendment is adopted, we will never see the president's tax returns while he's in office,” Representative Sander Levin told his Republican colleagues. “Before you stonewall this, I urge you to think twice. You'll only keep the issue alive.”

Last year, after some of Trump’s worrying foreign conflicts were exposed, I argued that Congress cannot fulfill its constitutional duty to check and balance the next president, or provide adequate oversight of the federal agencies he presides over, without a full, accurate understanding of his business holdings and debts. I urged Americans to tell their representatives that they favor an exhaustive inquiry into Trump’s finances to determine exactly where his interests and ours diverge.

The amendment was rejected on a party-line vote by these 23 Republicans

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...eturns/516768/