The Supreme Court has put an end to the federal lawsuit against Donald Trump’s construction of a new ballroom and underground complex on the site of the White House East Wing, which he demolished last fall. The Court was right to keep the judiciary out of this brouhaha.
To recap: Many past presidents have renovated what was once known as the Executive Mansion. While Article I gives Congress power over federal property, in practice, Congress for two centuries has acquiesced in presidents’ putting their own stamp on the building, often — like Trump — with privately raised funds. The existing laws on the question require careful parsing (what is or isn’t an “improvement?”), but because they are embedded in appropriations, the wiser view is that if Congress wants to stop the president from altering federal property, Congress can use the power of the purse to do so. It should assert that power more aggressively if Trump ends up asking for taxpayer money, a topic on which the administration has been less than entirely candid.
The current Congress, of course, is apt to let the real estate developer at 1600 Pennsylvania have his way in the people’s house, even if his expertise in building projects doesn’t always equate to good taste. Not content to let interbranch dynamics play out, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States decided to make a federal case of the ballroom. How was it injured? Because one of its members, Alison Hoagland, is an architectural historian of federal buildings who “expects to visit the neighborhood around the White House about once a month” and “asserts that having to view the finished ballroom the government is constructing would cause her to suffer injuries to her aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests because she finds the scale, height, and massing of the government’s design distasteful.”
The Court rightly found that “aesthetic standing,” a questionable Seventies-era innovation in environmental law, does not allow people offended by the look of what the government is doing to file lawsuits to vindicate their decorative taste. The Court does not wish to live in “a world where virtually every citizen had standing to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like,” and neither do we. The courts play a vital role in a system of written law, but it is a limited one, focused on protecting individual rights and stopping overweening assertions of government power — not policing quarrels over decor.
The remedy ordered by the district court only underlines why this is not a proper use of the judicial power. The injunction allowed work to continue on the portions of the complex below ground level — i.e., out of sight, out of mind for Professor Hoagland — while aiming to stop the visible aspects of the new ballroom. The administration filed sworn declarations as to the impractical nature of this injunction from the director of national intelligence, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the director of the United States Secret Service, the secretary of state, the secretary of homeland security, and the secretary of the Army. Especially after the attempt on Trump’s life at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, it is hard to see how any courtroom is the proper place to resolve such questions.