Noah Feldman, Columnist

Supreme Court Tax Return Case Isn't Actually About Trump

The Supreme Court is essentially deciding how much power Congress really has.

May 12, 2020 at 6:00 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

This is how we do Supreme Court arguments now.
Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

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You might think that the Supreme Court case regarding President Donald Trump’s tax returns is about him, or least about the power of the presidency. It isn’t. As Tuesday’s live-streamed oral arguments made clear, this is a case about Congress — and whether its oversight authority will be stripped away by an activist Supreme Court.

The Constitution gives Congress “all legislative powers herein granted.” The text of the Constitution doesn’t speak of “legislative oversight” because the phrase itself wasn’t used until the 1830s, and didn’t become widespread until after World War II.