The likelihood that Donald Trump would voluntarily release his own tax returns probably hit zero well before his 100th day in the presidency. But his resistance alone might not be enough to keep them out of public view: A bill now being considered by the New York State Legislature would require Trump’s state tax returns to be published online. Since those contain much of the same information that’s in his federal returns, we’d finally get a sense not only of how much he’s actually worth, but how much he’d potentially stand to benefit from his radical tax-slashing plans. The idea to leverage the state legislature to reveal Trump’s taxes was originally proposed by Daniel Hemel, a law professor at the University of Chicago, in a Washington Post op-ed. More recently, Hemel has also issued a legal paper arguing for why it would hold up in court. I caught up with him last week for a breakdown on how the plan would work.

How did the idea end up in the state legislature? 
After I wrote the op-ed in the Washington Post, the office of Brad Hoylman, the state senator who represents lower Manhattan, contacted me to talk about it. Also, a constituent of David Buchwald, who represents Westchester County, went to the protest over Trump’s tax returns on April 15, saw her assemblyman there, and put us in touch. So this was grassroots democracy at its best. I also give a lot of credit to a New York lawyer named Andrea Weiss, who saw the op-ed and got together a group of lawyers in New York who are active in city and state politics. She worked on draft legislation and got state senators and assemblymen on board.

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