Editors at National Review Online respond to the most recent court ruling in the battle over a White House ballroom.
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.
