Trump appeals court ruling blocking IRS settlement

A president suing his own IRS, settling with his own IRS, then appealing a ruling that blocked the settlement his own administration agreed to. Read that sentence twice. It doesn't matter which side of the aisle you're on, that's not how this is supposed to work, and everyone involved knows it.

The underlying claim, that Trump was owed something like $10 billion after years of IRS scrutiny, may or may not have merit. That's a separate question from whether the executive branch gets to be plaintiff, defendant, and dealmaker all at once and call it justice. A court apparently thought the arrangement smelled bad enough to block it. Appealing that ruling doesn't make the optics better, it just moves the argument to a bigger stage.

We've spent years being told that norms matter, that appearances matter, that even the whiff of self-dealing corrodes trust in institutions. Fine. Apply that standard evenly. If a Democratic administration had settled a multibillion dollar personal claim against a federal agency it controls, this would be a five-alarm scandal on every front page in the country. It shouldn't take a hypothetical to notice the problem here.

None of this requires assuming bad faith to find troubling. Structuring a deal where the government negotiates against itself on the president's behalf is the kind of thing that should get resolved by an actual arm's-length process, not an appeal aimed at reviving an arrangement a judge already found problematic. Settle it the boring, transparent way. That's not asking for much.