Sarah Sanders: Congress is too dumb to understand Trump's 'success'

Sarah Huckabee Sanders says she hasn’t seen Trump’s taxes — but she’s nonetheless certain that Democratic members of Congress aren’t smart enough to review his returns.

Sanders was on Fox News Sunday defending Trump’s refusal to allow his taxes to be provided to Congress as requested. She told host Chris Wallace: “I don’t think Congress, particularly not this group of congressmen and women, are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages” of Trump’s taxes.

Why not? Because “most of them don’t do their own taxes, and I certainly don’t trust them to look through the decades of success that the President has and determine anything.”

One would think that if Trump’s taxes reflected such massive success, he’d be eager for the American people to see them.

Instead, Trump is increasingly desperate to hide what is in those returns.

He had Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin trot out the excuse that since the GOP never requested President Obama’s tax returns, the Democrats have no right to ask for Trump’s. Of course, that ignores the fact that Obama, like every other presidential candidate since Nixon, did release his taxes.

Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was tasked with saying that because people voted for Trump in 2016 when he hadn’t released his taxes, they shouldn’t want to see them now.

These arguments are weak on their face, but they also ignore some crucial points.

First of all, Trump can’t block the release of his returns. It’s not his decision to make, and the law makes it mandatory: the Secretary of the Treasury, the law says, shall furnish tax returns to Congress upon request from the appropriate House Committee.

That request has been made. After Mnuchin and Trump ignored the April 10 deadline, House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) requested the returns again, this time extending the deadline until April 23.

And second, Sarah Sanders shouldn’t worry that the Democrats won’t be able to understand Trump’s taxes. As Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) pointed out on Twitter, this year’s freshman House class includes “intelligence analysts, nurses, veterans, and – ahem – law professors.”

Porter, the law professor, is downplaying her skills just a bit here. She’s authored major textbooks on consumer law and debtor and creditor law. She also focuses on bankruptcy law — which means that, given Trump’s history of massive debt and multiple bankruptcies, she should do just fine.

Meanwhile, all Sanders can seem to do is lie to the public and belittle the American people who didn’t vote for her boss.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.