As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump bowled over the decades-old expectation that serious contenders for the White House disclose years’ worth of their tax returns. He made all sorts of flimsy excuses for refusing to do so. “There’s nothing to learn from them,” he insisted. It’s “none of your business.” “I don’t think anybody cares.” “The only ones that care about my tax returns are the reporters.” And so on.

But Trump and his lackeys returned to one excuse time and again: He couldn’t release his returns until the Internal Revenue Service completed a (possibly fabricated) audit. This dubious claim was offered as recently as April, on the eve of Tax Day, when then–press secretary Sean Spicer said, “It’s been covered before. It’s the same thing that was discussed during the campaign trail. The president is under audit. It’s a routine audit that continues.”

Because Trump’s campaign, and now his presidency, have teemed with so many serious scandals, his financial secrecy never defined him. But as Republicans regroup from their failure to roll back health insurance coverage, Trump’s tax returns, and the excuses he’s made for concealing them, will and should regain scrutiny, because the GOP’s new goal is to fast track regressive tax cuts into law before the year is out.

Trump’s substantive objectives in the looming debate over tax policy are muddled, but almost certainly wrongheaded. If Republicans are going to facilitate them, it will fall to them to respond to the public’s demand for the answers to two questions: How much will Trump be cutting his own taxes, and why did he lie to us about his returns?

Trump never deserved the benefit of the doubt over his ludicrous audit excuse, but he unintentionally removed all doubt when he told The New York Times last month that he would consider his finances off limits to the Justice Department investigators working with Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia investigation.