"This is not what serious oversight looks like," a GOP aide told reporters, adding, "We're worried about a cycle of political retribution that might come from this and one that will make our politics even more divisive. We think folks will come to regret this. We think Democrats will come to regret this, and I think they may regret it sooner than they think."
Right, so they're going to point to this as "justification" for whatever stupid punitive thing they next come up with when they're in power, and I'm sure we'll see plenty of people smugly echoing this in agreement. "This is all the Democrats' fault for insisting that Trump's tax returns be public!" Never mind that if it wasn't this that Republicans used as justification, it would be something else, and if they couldn't find anything to use at all, they'd do it anyway and insist that having the power to do something is its own justification. Requiring presidential candidates to reveal their tax returns is not unreasonable. If someone wants to be the president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, then yes, they should be financially transparent. It's simply not a big ask for someone who expects to be trusted with that kind of incredible power. Nobody is forcing anyone to run for president. If revealing their tax returns is something that a candidate is unwilling to do, then the very simple solution of not running for president is always open to them.
This shouldn't be a partisan issue. People of all political stripes should agree that requiring financial transparency from the president of the United States is a very good thing and should be the law. It's ludicrous that the Republicans' tribalism and blind loyalty to a former president is leading them to come down so hard on the clearly wrong side of a very, very simple issue.