The Unlikely Winner In The SCOTUS Trump Tax Cases: Summer Zervos
The Zervos case could be important in an election year because it could shed light on Trump’s mistreatment and alleged sexual assault of women for female voters who make up a key voting bloc.
By Ciara Torres-Spelliscy
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July 28, 2020 10:00 a.m.
At the very end of the Supreme Court’s 2019-2020 term, the Justices finally decided cases on who could get access to President Donald Trump’s personal financial records. At issue in these cases were whether a prosecutor in New York and congressional committees could get their hands on Trump’s taxes and other financial information from his banks and accountants. An unnoticed winner in these cases was Summer Zervos, a woman who has been suing the President civilly for the past four years.
The two cases, Vance (the New York prosecutor case) and Mazars (the congressional committees case) have one thing in common: they rule that the President is not above the law. In Vance, the Supreme Court was unanimous on the point that a president cannot hide his personal papers from a criminal prosecutor. The ruling in Mazars was a bit more garbled as the Justices did not like the absolutist positions from either the President (who said he didn’t have to respond to congressional subpoenas) or Congress (who said that they could essentially subpoenas anything from anyone at any time). Both cases give Trump’s legal team leeway to muck up proceedings with legal maneuvering that may result in voters’ not seeing the contents of Trump’s financial documents until well after the 2020 election.
But between the two cases, there is an unlikely beneficiary: anyone who is suing Trump in civil state court. The reasons are three-fold: for one, if the President is not above the law and is going to be treated as any other citizen, then he can be sued just like any other citizen. Secondly, the Supreme Court rejected the notion in Vance that the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution protected the President from suit in state courts. And thirdly, the Supreme Court made clear in Vance that the Supreme Court was reaffirming the legal reasoning of an earlier case called Clinton v. Jones.
When the Vance and Mazars cases were making their way through the legal system, constitutional law professors like myself gave lots of interviews explaining that both the prosecutor and Congress had very strong cases because there just were not many cases on-point about the relationship between the President and his participation in legal cases. One was the Nixon case where an unanimous court ordered President Nixon to turn over his Oval Office tape recordings for use in a criminal case. Another was the Clinton case when an unanimous court declared that President Clinton could not delay participation in a civil suit accusing him of sexual harassment until the end of his presidency. Both of these cases stand for the proposition that the president of the United States is not above the law.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/unlikely-winner-trump-tax-scotus-cases-summer-zervos
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