Show us da money ..
Two showdowns over the scope of presidential power reach the Supreme Court today. The justices will consider—via live-streamed telephone hearings—President Donald Trump’s quest to keep his financial records secret. In April 2019, three congressional committees subpoenaed years of Mr Trump’s records from his banks and accountants. Lawmakers say the information could help them craft stronger ethics laws and guard against foreign influence in elections.
Several months later, the Manhattan district attorney issued subpoenas for Mr Trump’s financial records and tax returns for a grand-jury investigation into alleged hush-money payments to paramours. Mr Trump’s lawyers call both endeavours “unprecedented”. Efforts to “rifle through the president’s personal financial history”, they say, are designed only to “score political points”.
New York’s prosecutor counters that presidents would be above the law if they could not be investigated while in office. Precedent is not friendly to Mr Trump’s plea. When Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton faced other predicaments involving the separation of powers, the Supreme Court decided against both, unanimously.
Your first sentence proves the political nature of the Congressional investigation. It's just an attempt to to keep investigations and smearing of Trump going before the election. It has nothing to do with crafting legislation regarding the president. Additionally, wHile Congress has the right to have hearing and craft legislation, the president also has his rights of keeping tax records secret as allowed by law in a Congressional act. In this case you would have a committee overrule what an entire Congress has already legislated. It seems to me that a congressional law overrules a small committee's desire to ignore that law. Additionally, since the impeachment is over, and Trump was innocent, Congress can't use impeachment for seeking to see his records.
Regarding NYS prosecutor, I don't think they can overrule congressional protection of Federal tax records especially because the president was not charged with any crime. It's a fishing expedition. Additionally, it would grant any local jurisdiction who is from the opposite party or who wants to make a name for himself the right to investigate any president at any time while the president is serving. It will become a game as is happening now with these Democrat investigations. This is why the constitution prohibits this. Because our founders realized that investigations would become political in nature and the president would become too busy to do his job serving as president. They wanted to give him a clear head and freedom to do his job in Washington. If he did something wrong, then they have to wait until after his presidency is over to investigate, indict, try, etc.
