Trump is pressuring the courts in his renaming campaign, but this is yet another abuse of presidential power that only Congress can address.
Trump is pressuring the courts in his renaming campaign, but this is yet another abuse of presidential power that only Congress can address.
T his week, in one of his habitually unhinged social media posts, President Trump outrageously threatened the federal courts that if they failed to reverse a lower-court ruling that he cannot etch his name on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, he will not allow the congressionally mandated $257 million renovation of the center to proceed. This was just a day after he lambasted the Supreme Court — targeting the three justices he appointed in his first term — for the Court’s sound refusal to greenlight his attempted pretextual use of the Postal Service to unilaterally regulate federal elections (a constitutional responsibility of Congress and the states, not the president).
Trump’s post asserted:
The Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name [i.e., the addition of Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, as approved by the president’s hand-picked board]. If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place. The attorneys from the DOJ will ask for an expedited appeal . . .
To be clear, the district judge, Christopher Cooper (an Obama appointee), has refused to allow Trump’s name to be added to the Kennedy Center because, by statute, Congress made the center, exclusively, a memorial to President Kennedy (who’d recently been assassinated at the time). While some of Judge Cooper’s May 29 opinion on the subject is mawkish, his discussion of the relevant statutory provisions (codified at Section 76h & ff. of Title 20, U.S. Code) is unassailable. Such as:
A few final points underscore the Center’s role not just as a national institution for the performing arts, but as a presidential memorial. Both the building and the institution are “designated” as the “John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” See id. §§ 76h(a)(1), 76i(a). Congress commanded that the Center be “the sole national memorial” to President Kennedy “within the city of Washington and its environs,” id. § 76q, and that it be a “living” memorial, id. § 76h(a)(1). With a handful of exceptions not relevant here, see id. § 76j(b)(2), “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas” of the Center. Id. § 76j(b)(1).
Only Congress can change the name. The president and the board he stacked are powerless to do so.
Moreover, the $257 million in public funds for what the president refers to as reconstruction and renovation was appropriated by Congress last year in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Pub. L. No. 119-21, 139 Stat. 72, 157). In the specific provision, Section 60025, Congress provided the funds, to be expended through the end of fiscal 2029, “for necessary expenses for capital repair, restoration, maintenance backlog, and security structures of the building and site of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.” (See Cooper opinion linked above, p. 13.)
There is nothing in the statute that makes the spending for reconstruction or renovation work contingent on the renaming of the center in Trump’s honor. Nor is there any conditioning of the spending on naming the grounds on which the center sits in Trump’s honor, an alternative Trump’s board recently proposed and the judge rejected this week — the ruling Trump’s post says his Justice Department is appealing. (Compare Section 76q-1, in which Congress addresses the “John F. Kennedy Center Plaza.”)
Through his board, the president has further ratcheted up the pressure by closing the Kennedy Center. Ostensibly, the board cites safety concerns — a five-foot-long section of ceiling plaster fell during a recent storm. There is, nevertheless, an undertone of defiance: Judge Cooper had ruled that the board has a statutory duty to maintain the center as “a living memorial” to JFK (see Section 76h(a)(1)), so the abrupt closure arguably flouts that decision. Query whether many will notice since it’s been months since the center presented much programming. In any event, the president has explicitly tied the facility’s shutdown to his name-change gambit. In essence: The center will remain shuttered, and the congressionally mandated renovation will not proceed, unless and until the higher courts give him what he wants — a reversal of Cooper’s ruling and his name on the edifice.
This is yet another abuse of presidential power that only Congress can address. It is a controversy about political power, not the law. The courts can make rulings — “It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is” (Marbury v. Madison, 1803) — but they have no enforcement power.
In our constitutional system, Congress makes the laws, and the president is oath-bound to faithfully execute the laws. If the president extortionately makes the execution of the laws conditional on compliance with his diktats, that’s an impeachable offense. Congress doesn’t necessarily need to address such misconduct by impeachment; it has other means to force the executive to stand down (denying funding, refusing confirmations, fomenting political pressure through public oversight hearings, etc.). But if Congress doesn’t take some action to induce a presidential retreat, no one else can.
Republicans used to defend Congress’s prerogatives. Today’s Republicans are cowed by Trump, so they either hide under their desks or sing along with his rants during these increasingly frequent tantrums. This emboldens Trump to engage in still more narcissistic malfeasance by which the public, in ever larger majorities, is repulsed. Democrats, despite the lunacy of their socialist base, gain credibility with voters by stridently condemning these unpopular actions — as Trump persists in helping his opponents by making the public debate all about him, not them.
The midterms are shaping up as a trouncing that Republicans will richly deserve. And when the impeachment proceedings start next year, the president will have himself to blame.