Just why shouldn’t Trump finances be scrootin’ed the way IRS does for us?

TRUMP: On tax issue, nunya bizness is his 'tude

Monday was Tax Day, and some 50 million U.S. taxpayers (about one-sixth of the nation) waited until the deadline before filing their returns that acknowledge just how much they need to “pay up” to the guv’mint!

Yes, I must confess, I was amongst them. I made my trek to the post office Monday morning to ensure my envelopes to the Internal Revenue Service and Illinois Department of Revenue got the necessary postmarks confirming I met the April 15 deadline.

NOW BECAUSE I’M working the freelance routine, I’m constantly checking my mailbox for checks – none of which have any money withheld for taxes.

Meaning that for me, this is the time of year I have to acknowledge just how big my share of financial support for the state and federal governments during the past year was. And above all else, I have to PAY UP!

My share isn’t significant. Our nation certainly isn’t going to pay off its debts based off what I provide them.

Although it’s like the thoughts of one-time Sen. Everett McKinley Dirksen, who once said, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

WHICH IS A thought we should keep in mind when our political people quibble over whether President Donald Trump ought to publicly disclose his own income tax returns.

DIRKSEN: A million here, a million there … 

Unlike most contemporary politicos, Trump has steadfastly refused to make his returns public – taking an attitude that’s something along the lines of “none of your business!”

Although I suspect that Trump’s real reason for so stubbornly refusing to let us see his returns – when putting together my own return this year, I couldn’t help but note the many potential tax write-offs that are available to certain people.

The write-offs that make it possible for them to significantly reduce the amount of their overall income that gets taxed. With some people being able to write off so much that they essentially wind up owing the government nothing.

IT WOULDN’T SHOCK me to learn that the roughly one-quarter I owed in taxes this year of the just under $16,000 I earned as a freelance writer during 2018 would be a larger share than what Trump has paid out.

DALEY: Scrootin'ed?

I’m also sure that the average U.S. taxpayer has an income situation closer to mine than to anything resembling the Trumpster. Which means keeping this issue low-key is more about Trump trying to keep the public from realizing how different he is from they are.

We hear talk from Trump about how his business finances are under audit and he doesn’t want to interfere with any IRS review being done. I think it’s more about him being arrogant enough to think it’s none of our business.

Because if it were our business, we’d have the kind of finances that would make us eligible for all kinds of tax write-offs. Since we don’t, he probably thinks we’re just financial chumps – but certainly doesn’t want it publicly known that he truly regards us as peons.

IT WILL BE interesting to see if House Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., has any luck in swaying the IRS in releasing the past six years worth of Trump’s returns. Or will the IRS conclude that this is merely a Democratic effort at playing partisan politics against the president.

NEAL: Will he get Trump taxes?

We’ll have to see just how much scrutiny our officials want to have done on our president.

Which actually reminds me of the 2001 moment when then-Mayor Richard M. Daley spoke of the concept, saying, “What else do you want? Do you want to take my shorts? Give me a break. How much scrutiny do you want to have? Go scrutinize yourself. I get scrootin’ed every day.”

Perhaps what we really need is for Trump to be scrootin’ed by the masses to make this issue go away. Just like the rest of us are submitting our own finances to by the IRS.

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Freshman senator already declares candidacy for an Illinois top pol spot

I remember a time some two decades ago at the Statehouse in Springfield interviewing a legislator – Nancy Kaszak from Chicago’s Northwest Side.

STAVA-MURRAY: A freshman playing like powerhouse

What sticks in my mind about this interview was now unproductive it was. She wasn’t able to say much, ultimately explaining her ignorance on the issue by saying, “I’m a freshman” and that leadership hadn’t kept her fully appraised of this particular issue.

I COULDN’T HELP but think back to Kaszak when I heard this week about Anne Stava-Murray – a newly-elected Illinois House member from suburban Naperville. She hasn’t even taken office yet, but already has declared her political intentions for the 2020 election cycle.

She’s am ambitious sort, I’ll give her that. She’s going to run for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois that will be open next year. That, of course, is the seat currently held (and has been since 1996) by Richard Durbin.

Of course, the presumption is that Durbin will be seeking re-election. If he were going to try moving to another political post, the obvious shift would be to try becoming Illinois’ governor.

DURBIN: Does he have credible opponent?

But that would have entailed him being willing to give up his current Senate seat in order to run in last year’s election cycle – instead of becoming one of J.B. Pritzker’s political supporters. He wasn’t willing to risk his seat – and it may well be he enjoys being one of the Senate’s elder statesmen, with hopes his name will someday be held in the same regard as Everett McKinley Dirksen, who served in D.C. from 1933 until his death in 1969.

THE LONG-AGO Republican from Pekin who became among the GOP elder statemen with a reputation for being willing to work in a bipartisan political manner. A legend, of sorts, in the halls of Capitol Hill.

Except to people like Stava-Murray, who claims that if Durbin were serious, he’d have already formally declared his candidacy. Although I suspect he already has the beginnings of a re-election bid up and running in a low-key manner.

MADIGAN: Her 'real' opponent?

She’s already setting her sights on Durbin, which will have one political benefit for her.

It will help her erase the stink of being just a freshman representative in the Illinois House – one that she was definitely going to face because she has openly talked of the need to dump long-time (a full half-century) Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, from his political post.

SHE WAS IN full agreement with those Republican ideologues who tried running campaigns last year on the grounds that we need to “Dump Madigan!” and she publicly refused to take the aid that Madigan usually provides to Democrats to support his own Illinois House majority.

It’s not likely she’d have a lengthy future as a representative, since I don’t doubt the Madigan operation is already seeking someone more politically sympathetic to “Mr. Speaker” to challenge Stava-Murray come 2020.

DIRKSEN: Most definitely of the past

But by doing this, she’ll shift the story from her being a renegade legislator to her being one of Illinois’ top politicos (along with Sen. Tammy Duckworth, Gov.-elect Pritzker and whichever of the assorted characters manages to win the mayoral elections to be held next month and in April).

I don’t doubt that Democratic operatives will go out of their way to undermine Stava-Murray and try to ensure she returns to being a political nobody after next year.

BUT I HAVE to wonder what goes through her mindset – if she really thinks she’s the beneficiary of a revolutionary “movement” against Madigan, instead of someone who won because of the intense level of contempt many of us feel for Donald Trump!

TRUMP: His critics led Stava-Murray to win

To me, the explanation is that she’s from Naperville – which once was a part of the great DuPage County Republican organization that was among the strengths of the GOP nationwide.

There once would have been a time when Stava-Murray would have been a Republican aspirant for political office – except that the Republicans have gone so far overboard to become the political party of rural America that I suspect if she had tried to run in the Republican primary last year, she’d have lost. They wouldn't want her. She's a Democrat by default!

It may well be that Stava-Murray is showing off her political ignorance and doesn’t fully realize “which side” she’s on. For her sake, she’s going to have to figure things out and “pick a side,” or else it could turn into a bloody two years for her.

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BRADY & CALLAHAN: Blasts from political past, or our present loss?

The Illinois political scene lost a pair of individuals who provided a sense of institutional memory in the form of officials who went on to be significant in federal government, while never forgetting just where they came from.


The death of James Brady, the one-time Reagan-era White House press secretary turned into an avid gun control activist after being shot in that 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan himself, came the same day as the death of Gene Callahan.


FOR THOSE WHOSE memories aren’t quite as deep, he was a one-time advisor to Paul Simon when he was Illinois lieutenant governor, then became an advisor to the recently-departed Alan Dixon when he served in the U.S. Senate.


Callahan, who was 80, had just as active a post-government payroll life. For a time, he was the Washington-based lobbyist for Major League baseball. His political spirit will live on in a sense through Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., who in addition to being the member of Congress from the Quad Cities is also his daughter.


I remember encountering both Brady and Callahan during my 1990s stint as a reporter-type person at the Statehouse in Springfield when they would return to the capital city to promote their causes and/or keep up their contacts.


What was always clear about both was that although their lives had taken them far from the rural Illinois communities where they were raised (Brady from Centralia, Callahan from Milford), neither had forgotten where they came from and how they got their starts here.


CALLAHAN WAS A columnist with what is now the Springfield-based Journal-Register newspaper when he became a political operative with Simon back when he was our local guy rather than any national figure.


Brady, who was73, had a whole laundry list of political officials he worked for prior to becoming part of the Nixon and Ford administrations in the White House. But the first of them was Everett McKinley Dirksen of Pekin.




While Brady was a life-long Republican and Callahan tended to work for Democrats, what I remember hearing from both of them was the need for a bipartisan cooperation.


I haven’t heard from either man in years, but somehow I suspect they were among the dismayed officials who couldn’t help but wonder where we went wrong in electing officials to government posts who were more determined to create stalemates as their lasting legacy.


NOTHING GETS ACCOMPLISHED. Whoopee!!!!


Heck, Brady eventually was able to persuade Reagan himself to accept the idea that some legal restrictions on firearms was not a national surrender to the “Commies” – the way some ideologues want to perceive it.


It’s really a shame that both men are now gone. Because I wonder if what our political culture really needs these days is a good healthy dose of more people just like them.


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