M S Bellows Jr. of The Guardian has a theory that Mitt Romney doesn't want you to see any more of his tax returns because they'd reveal the fact that he voted fraudulently in the 2010 Massachusetts special election for U.S. Senate while claiming residency in California for tax purposes.
It's an interesting notion, but I don't buy it because, when you're Mitt Romney, your legal residence, for tax and voting purposes, is wherever you say it is. And if there are contradictions in what you say, well, you just hire a bunch of lawyers and file a few amended documents and those problems go away, especially when fellow Republicans in positions of responsibility help you out.
If that weren't the case, Mitt Romney would never have become governor of Massachusetts, as this AP story from 2002, the year of his run, makes clear:
Republican Mitt Romney is eligible to run for governor, a state board ruled Tuesday, unanimously rejecting Democrats' claim that he doesn't meet Massachusetts' residency requirement because of the time he spent in Utah running the Salt Lake City Olympics....Romney brazened that out. He would brazen out a similar problem now. (If a rich prson does it, it's simply not voter fraud. Only peasants commit voter fraud, for Pete's sake.)
The five-member Ballot Law Commission -- made up of three Republicans, one Democrat, and one member with no declared affiliation -- concluded that Romney "was credible in all respects regarding the fact that (he) intended Massachusetts to be his domicile from 1971 to the present."
... Romney lived in the Boston suburb of Belmont from 1971 to 1999, then moved to Utah to oversee the 2002 Winter Olympics. He returned to Massachusetts in March. While living in Utah, he maintained his Belmont home and was registered to vote in Massachusetts.
But the state Democratic Party argued that Romney did not meet the state constitutional requirement that a candidate for governor be a legal resident of Massachusetts for seven years before the election.
At the center of the case were Massachusetts tax returns Romney filed while in Utah. Romney filed in 1999 as a part-year Massachusetts resident and in 2000 as a nonresident.
Romney changed those returns to Massachusetts resident in April, after deciding to run for governor, saying his longtime tax advisers at Pricewaterhouse Coopers had made a mistake.
The Democrats also highlighted a $54,500 tax break Romney received on his Utah home that was reserved for primary residences, and public statements he had made in Utah to show he was considering running for office there....
During and after the hearings, newspaper editorials around the state accused the Democrats of trying to deny voters a choice at the ballot box. Romney tried to exploit that sentiment by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on TV and radio ads criticizing the case....
No -- Romney's clearly hiding something much more embarrassing.
Yeah, Steve, I'm with you.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read this on BJ earlier, that's exactly what I figured - no way that little thing is what he's hiding.
And while you were away, you had to love his, 'Oh yeah, btw - I DID check my tax returns for the last 13 years, and, what do you know? I DID pay at least 13% every year! So, this issue is now resolved.'
Yeah, ok, I'm buying that.
I just can't believe that he believes we're ALL THAT stupid!
He must be hoping that at least 24% of the people above the right's 27% base, is THAT stupid.
If I'm Reid and Obama, I don't let up on this.
Maybe he, or rather his accountants, in a year in which he didn't pay ANY taxes at all, figured out a way that he got a nice 6-or-7-figure return anyway.
Let Sally Six-pack and Chip Chick fil-a figure out a way to digest that little bit of news, and still justify voting for Mittens.
It's probably not that.
But it's got to be PRETTY BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!
Lawrence O'Donnell has floated the idea that Romney was included in the overseas account tax amnesty of 2009, where the government forwent putting tax cheats in durance vile, as long as they paid up on what they owed on their accounts and promised not to do so again.
ReplyDeleteThere were only 14,700 taxpayers to do so, so he'd be in a pretty elite club, donja think?
My money's on the amnesty too. Almost anything else would be spinnable, but that would be lethal.
ReplyDeleteTo me it's always seemed obvious that Mitt had a UBS amnesty problem...even before I learned that the release of his 2010 return omitted one key document, his Foreign Bank and Financial Account Report.
ReplyDeleteLooked at from the other direction, it's also obvious from the length and aggressiveness of the attack on Mitt's taxes that Obama knows with certainty that Romney cannot release any of his earlier taxes. A couple days ago they drilled down and signaled that the problem is in the tax returns from the 3 years before 2010. Obama can't go rooting through Romney's IRS records, but the 2009 amnesty was negotiated within the Executive Branch and not exclusively by the IRS. So the names on the amnesty list can legitimately be known to the White House.