The Illinois Senate has put its foot down strong in the paint. On Thursday, the Democratic-led Senate proposed a deal that anti-Trump fans can get behind—either Trump releases five years’ worth of his personal income tax returns so they can see how many rubles he received from Russian oligarchs or he won’t appear on the state’s presidential ballot next year.
National Public Radio reports that this is the crest of a movement by Democratic states to force the president to stop playing the “I would love to but I’m being audited right now” game with his tax returns.
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From NPR:
During contentious floor debate in the Illinois statehouse, Trump’s name wasn’t mentioned once by the legislation’s sponsor, state Sen. Tony Munoz, a Chicago Democrat who insisted he merely is trying to shed more transparency on the presidential campaign.
“If you want to run for vice president or president of the United States, hey, what’s wrong with providing your tax returns for the past five years?” Munoz asked his colleagues ahead of the Senate’s 36-19 vote in favor of his bill.
“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you shouldn’t worry about anything,” he continued. “That’s how I see it.”
Democrats had been pushing for Trump to release his tax returns when he was a candidate in the 2016 election in hopes of finding how a man who couldn’t borrow money inside the United States was balling without the help of Russian interests.
Last week, House Dems told Trump to let those taxes loose, but the president’s fuckboy and head of the treasury, Steve Mnuchin (who could use another vowel in his last name) has been playing “Taxes? Oh I thought you said ‘waxes.’ Yeah, we are going to be late on those due to miscommunication” game.
NPR notes that, “in New York state, Democrats in Albany have sought to work around the White House’s intransigence on the issue by trying to gain access to Trump’s state income tax returns.”
Of course, Illinois Republicans weren’t happy and claimed that the move was unconstitutional and avoided other ballers including the “state’s newly installed billionaire governor, Democrat JB Pritzker.”
“This is quite frankly, with all due respect to the sponsor, an embarrassing waste of the Senate’s time,” said state Sen. Dale Righter, R-Mattoon, NPR reports.
“This is being pushed by a far-leftist organization from the city of Chicago that wants to be able to get up and chirp about the president of the United States,” Righter said. “We ought to be better than this.”
Well, we ought to be better than a lot of things, like using migrant children as pawns in a war about a dumb as wall that no one wants, but guess what, we aren’t.
“The measure now moves to the Illinois House, which like the Senate is heavily controlled by Democrats,” NPR reports. This means it’s going to pass and the president is going to have to show those taxes or he won’t be on the ballot in Illinois, which is fine by him since the state was won by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
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