Top Senate Democrats announced Thursday a plan to require President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees to release tax returns to the Senate committees responsible for confirming them before hearings take place.
At a press conference Thursday, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced Senate Democrats’ plans to push for a rule expanding the current authority of Senate committees in January so that all the President-elect’s nominees will be required to provide their tax returns from the past three years.
Only the Senate Committee on Finance, Senate Committee on the Budget and the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee currently have that authority.
“Americans deserve to know whether or not President-Elect Trump’s team of millionaires and billionaires will actually work for all of the American people or only the wealthy and the well-connected,” Stabenow said in a statement.
Murray said in a statement that the plan was a response to Trump’s “record of secrecy and cronyism,” citing the President-elect’s campaign promises to “fight Wall Street and big business” as a marked contrast to his nomination of establishment figures and wealthy insiders to his incoming administration.
The plan to require Trump’s nominees to provide their tax returns before confirmation hearings take place highlights the President-elect’s refusal to make his own tax returns public, a position he maintained throughout his campaign.
“Obviously we’ll be working with legal counsel and making sure that we’re putting together all the appropriate information that needs to get put out and really comply with everything that we need to in advance of the hearings,” Trump transition spokesman Jason Miller told reporters in a conference call Thursday morning when asked for his response to the plan. “We’ll come back to you on that one.”
