A lesson from Tricky Dick on taxes -- Aug. 1, 2019 column

By MARSHA MERCER

“Make sure you pay your taxes,” former President Richard Nixon told David Frost in a television interview in 1977. “Otherwise, you can get in a lot of trouble.”

If Nixon were advising presidential candidates today, he might add: “And release your tax returns.”

Since President Donald Trump took office, dozens of states, including Virginia, have considered – and rejected -- requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to appear on state ballots.

But California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, Tuesday signed the Presidential Tax Transparency and Accountability Act, which passed on party line votes in the legislature.

To appear on the Democratic or Republican primary ballot, presidential and gubernatorial candidates now must release five years of tax returns, which will be posted online.

“These are extraordinary times and states have a legal and moral duty to do everything in their power to ensure leaders seeking the highest offices meet minimal standards, and to restore public confidence,” Newsom said in a signing statement.

“The disclosure required by this bill will shed light on conflicts of interest, self-dealing or influence from domestic and foreign business interest,” he added.

See you in court, replied the Trump campaign, which contends the new law is unconstitutional.

Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, vetoed a very similar bill in 2017, warning of a slippery slope. Next time, it could be a red state demanding a birth certificate or health records, Brown warned.

If the law withstands judicial scrutiny, Trump must release his returns by November for the March 3 primary. The law does not affect the general election in November 2020.

Trump says voters elected him even though he refused to release his returns. He has a point. If voters cared, they could have flocked to rival Jeb Bush, who set a record by releasing 33 years of tax returns in 2016.

The Constitution lists only three qualifications for president: at least 35 years old, a citizen born in the United States and a resident in the United States for at least 14 years. So how did we get here?

The Constitution also gives states authority to decide how their electors are chosen. Each state writes its own laws setting the rules for candidates to appear on state ballots, such as petitions with signatures of a certain number of registered voters.

Federal courts have struck down several state laws involving congressional elections, including term limits. The California law raises questions about what restrictions states can place on presidential candidates.

We see the tax returns of presidential candidates and presidents because of a tradition that began after a scandal involving Nixon, according to Joseph J. Thorndike, director of the tax history project of Tax Analysts and author of several books on taxation, who appeared before a congressional panel in February. 

Newspapers published stories based on leaks of details of Nixon’s tax returns, showing he had paid just $792 in federal income taxes in 1970 and $873 in 1971.

“People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook,” Nixon said at a newspaper editors’ convention in November 1973. “Well, I am not a crook.”

Three weeks later, he voluntarily released four years of tax returns to reporters and asked the Joint Committee on Taxation, Congress’ nonpartisan tax experts, to examine them.

The committee’s audit identified an improper deduction for his gift of his vice presidential papers to the National Archives as well as incorrect capital gains treatment on the sales of his apartment in New York and part of his property in San Clemente, Calif. The president owed $476,451 in back taxes and interest.

To this day, no one knows if Nixon paid up. No check was publicly shown, Nixon resigned because of Watergate and President Gerald Ford granted him a full pardon.

But since 1977, IRS policy has required an audit of every tax return filed by a sitting president and vice president, Thorndike said, and every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama has released his tax returns during audits.

California’s new law is partisan and punitive to the Trump fans, and it could backfire on Democrats.

But Nixon was right: Americans do need to know whether their president is a crook. Like his predecessors, Trump should have released his tax returns, and he should do so now.

©2019 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Giving the president the hook -- July 30, 2015 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Good news: Barack Obama will not subvert the Constitution and grab a third presidential term.  

Most Americans never imagined that he’d do such a thing, but oddball doomsayers have warned for years that Obama was angling for a presidency for life.   

“I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t,” Obama said Tuesday in Ethiopia. “The law is the law.”

He was giving the hook to African leaders who sometimes govern for decades. In this country, though, his comments set off a Seinfeldian debate about nothing. Could he win a third term if he could run, which he can’t?

His comments about age and presidential term limits, though, are worth examining.

“I’m still a pretty young man, but I know that somebody with new energy and new insights will be good for my country,” said Obama, who will turn 54 Tuesday.

“In our world, old thinking can be a stubborn thing. That’s one of the reasons why we need term limits -- old people think old ways,” he said.

If Obama believes this country needs someone younger than he next time around, what does that say about the Democrats’ elderly team of rivals? Grandma Hillary, 67, the presumptive frontrunner, may have a golden resume but Clinton is hard to sell as a candidate of new energy and new insights.

Throngs of Democrats flock to hear Bernie Sanders, who has vinegar, but he is 73. Joe Biden’s humanity makes him the Democrats’ favorite potential presidential candidate who’s not in the race. He’s 72. It may take a Hillary implosion to bring him into the fray.  

Among Republican hopefuls, several are younger than Obama – and all can claim new energy and insight. Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz are 44, Scott Walker is 47, and Rand Paul is 52. But it’s an irrepressible old guy with no elective experience who’s leading the pack.

Donald Trump, 69, said he wished Obama could run again so Trump could beat him and everyone else. Trump has energy and unusual insights, all right, but he scares most Republicans. Also in their 60s: Jeb Bush, 62, Lindsey Graham, 60, John Kasich, 63, and Rick Perry, 65.

Setting aside the current competition, it’s worth asking: Do we need presidential term limits or should voters decide how long to keep a president?

"If they want to vote for someone, we shouldn’t have a rule that tells them they can’t.”

That’s not a wistful Bill Clinton. That’s conservative superhero President Ronald Reagan who said in 1987 that he hoped to “start a movement” after he left the White House to repeal the two-term limit on the presidency.  The change would not apply to him, Reagan said, but to his successors.

Since the 22^nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, people have been arguing about the wisdom of prohibiting someone from being elected to the presidency more than twice or serving more than 10 years. A vice president who serves more than two years of a previous president’s term and a full term may not run for re-election.  

For example, more than two years remained in Richard Nixon’s term when he resigned and Vice President Gerald Ford took over. Had Ford beat Jimmy Carter in 1976, Ford could have served only one full term and could not have run for re-election.

The Founders saw the presidency as a short-term gig. Delegates to the 1797 Constitutional Convention debated a six- or seven-year term and then agreed on four years. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson set the precedent of two terms, and the tradition stuck until the 1940s.

Only after Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won a fourth term did the rules change. Bills proposing a constitutional amendment to repeal the 22^nd Amendment have died in Congress over and over.  

As they should. The Founders who feared a restoration of the monarchy had the right idea. No one person should dominate our highest office indefinitely. We should keep the two-term limit. Even Obama is fine with it.     

“You can see my gray hair – I’m getting old,” he said.         

©2015 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Living with Clinton, Bush fatigue -- March 20, 2014 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The Ready for Hillary super PAC has raised $4 million to encourage Hillary Clinton to get in the 2016 presidential race.

Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that helped elect Barack Obama, has also thrown its considerable muscle behind Clinton’s expected candidacy. It plans to raise and spend far more than the $67 million it dropped on attack ads against Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign.

Clinton probably won’t announce her plans until the end of the year, but you don’t have to wait to buy Hillary gear -- a Ready for Hillary mug goes for $20.16 – or to glimpse what’s likely ahead. We already know.    

“Is Hillary Clinton too old to run?” the headline teased on a column by Charlie Cook in National Journal last month. Cook is the publisher of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report and a respected campaign and elections analyst. He wrote:   

“Clinton turns 67 this October. At that age, she will likely be making her candidacy decision, and if nominated Clinton would turn 69 two weeks before the 2016 general election, notably the same age Ronald Reagan was when he was first elected in 1980. The choice to run for president is effectively a nine-year commitment: one year to run, another four years if she wins a first term – finishing up that term at age 73 – and then, assuming she runs for re-election and wins, serving four more years to end a second term at 77 years of age.”

Cook stirred a hornet’s nest. More than 4,200 comments flooded nationaljournal.com, and the vast majority were anti-Clinton, “among the most vitriolic that I have encountered in 28 years of column writing,” Cook wrote.

The Clintons are our Rorshach political couple. Americans adore and abhor them, see them as devils and divinity. Hillary Clinton’s fans saw the age question as sexist. Who asks if Vice President Joe Biden is too old to run? He’s five years older than Clinton. 

Many voters in 2016 will be too young to remember – and some weren’t yet born – when the Clintons occupied the White House. Others won’t remember much about Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. People who were just 10 years old when she ran last time will be voting in 2016. Having a fresh message and appeal is a challenge for boomer candidates. 

Some of Clinton’s friends reportedly are hoping she won’t run; they worry that the commitment is too much for someone in her late 60s.

Just reading about her possible nine-year commitment makes me tired – not for her but the rest of us.

Democratic and Republican partisans will man (and woman) the barricades again, of course, but my guess is that many of us have a nagging case of Clinton fatigue – and Bush fatigue. Does anybody really want nine more years of daily, hand-to-hand, political warfare such as we’ve endured since 1993?   

I’m with former first lady Barbara Bush. When she said last year that “we’ve had enough Bushes” in the White House, I cheered. She enlarged on that theme in January.

“If we can’t find more than two or three families to run for high office, that’s silly,” she said on C-SPAN. “And I think that the Kennedys, Clintons, Bushes – there are just more families than that.”

Even if Hillary Clinton does not run, another Clinton may yet appear on a national ballot, just as the Bushes have potential candidates of their own.

A couple of weeks ago, Barbara Bush told an interviewer on Fox & Friends that “maybe it’s OK” for two or three families to dominate American politics, as has happened before. Say it isn’t so.

Her son Jeb, 61, the former governor of Florida and the son and brother of presidents, is showing up more often at political events, raising his profile and buzz.

And if Jeb says no, the Bush dynasty doesn’t end there. George P. Bush, Jeb’s son and George W.’s nephew, just won the Republican primary for Texas Land Commissioner and is expected to win again in November. George P. Bush speaks Spanish fluently and should connect with Latinos, something few Republicans can claim. His mother was born in Mexico. He’s 37.

And speaking of dynasties, Chelsea Clinton must have inherited political genes. What’s in her future? She’s 34.

Like it or not, we just may have to live with Clinton and Bush fatigue.

© 2014 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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