Query: does this ruling violate the domestic Emoluments clause and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment?
What rough beasts would rubber-stamp such a rule for rebarbative reprobates?
UnAmerican activities, and a stench in the nostrils of our Nation?
You tell me.
From The New York Times:
NEWS ANALYSIS
Republicans Let Trump Keep Unparalleled Benefit: I.R.S. Immunity
The rebellion against Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general, now seemingly contained, at no point fundamentally questioned President Trump’s new protections from the I.R.S.
Reporting from Washington
Even as he bowed to Republican demands to pare back the extraordinary benefits the Justice Department offered to President Trump and his allies this spring, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, would only go so far.
Mr. Blanche did, after weeks of back and forth, put in writing that he was ending the $1.8 billion fund created to pay people who say they have been targeted by Democratic officials. And as part of the same announcement Sunday night, Mr. Blanche clarified that there were, actually, some limits on the seemingly boundless protection from I.R.S. examination that he ordered up for Mr. Trump, his family and their businesses.
But the fact remains that Mr. Trump, a billionaire who has tangled with the I.R.S. throughout his life, no longer has to worry about the agency coming after him for any of the many aggressive tax positions he has taken over the years. Where the I.R.S. previously made a point of regularly auditing whoever occupies the Oval Office, Mr. Trump has leveraged his control of the federal government to instead escape the scrutiny that every other modern president, not to mention every other regular taxpayer, has been subject to.
There’s no question that such immunity, itself without precedent, will be immensely valuable for Mr. Trump. But exactly how much in additional taxes and penalties he can now avoid is unclear. I.R.S. audits are, in general, confidential. Just one dispute Mr. Trump had with the agency, previously revealed by The New York Times, could have cost him more than $100 million. Any other ongoing audits could have cost him even more.
“I’ve been audited every year for my entire life, which — I have a lot of wealthy friends that were never audited to this day, they were never audited. I was audited,” Mr. Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday. “I was treated very unfairly by the I.R.S.”
Mr. Trump’s newly won ability to thwart the tax agency does not seem to bother the Senate Republicans who refused to advance Mr. Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general without changes to the deal. Both of them, Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, said on Monday that they were satisfied with Mr. Blanche’s concessions and would vote to approve him.
Indeed, Mr. Cornyn and Mr. Tillis had only ever sought to correct the sloppy way the audit protection was drafted — and to put in writing Mr. Blanche’s previous, spoken clarifications. Mr. Cornyn, for example, asked Mr. Blanche to state that Mr. Trump could only avoid audits of tax returns he had already filed, meaning that the president could still face an I.R.S. exam of claims he makes the next time he does his taxes.
The initial wording of Mr. Blanche’s May 19 order also seemed to extend the protection not only to Mr. Trump, but to his entire family “without limitation” and any companies they were connected to. That raised the possibility of a huge pool of people and companies claiming immunity under the deal.
Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, last month sought to test the boundaries of Mr. Blanche’s proclamation, asking 11 companies with connections to Trump family members, including Kalshi, Polymarket and American Bitcoin, if they considered themselves protected from I.R.S. audits. Six of the companies, including those three, respond
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