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Federal judge demolishes legal "basis" for Trump's ballroom
Judge Leon offered a masterclass in exposing MAGA nonsense.
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A federal judge just told President Trump he has to stop building his tacky, enormous ballroom until he gets congressional approval. Unsurprisingly, Trump immediately said he would keep building it anyway, trying to squeeze his precious new obsession through a national security-sized exception in Judge Richard Leon’s ruling.
Leon, a 76-year-old George W. Bush appointee, wrote a banger of an opinion granting the preliminary injunction requested by the plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. The ruling makes crystal clear that the administration’s own arguments compelled the outcome here.
Yes, Donald Trump, you played yourself.
Leon gave administration officials every opportunity to cite some legal authority that allowed Trump to demolish the East Wing and build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom in its place, no pesky Congress needed, and they couldn’t. But to understand why Trump lost this week, we have to unpack why he hadn’t lost already.
“No statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims”
Immediately after filing their lawsuit last December, the Trust moved for a temporary restraining order. Judge Leon denied it, saying the Trust had not shown it would suffer “irreparable harm” that warranted immediate relief. Then, in February, Leon denied the Trust’s motion for a preliminary injunction, saying neither of their legal theories offered them a path to relief.
The Trust initially argued that Trump violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to submit plans to review boards and by failing to prepare an environmental assessment. Leon’s February ruling, however, explained that the Office of Executive Residence (EXR), which the administration said was the entity managing the East Wing project, is not an agency for purposes of the APA.
So, no luck for the Trust there, and in part that was because the administration is adept at a sort of hypertechnical slipperiness that makes it impossible to pin down who to sue or how.
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The Trust initially sued multiple entities that are indeed agencies and would, in a normal world, have something to do with the construction of a giant ballroom on federal government land, like the National Park Service, the Department of the Interior, and the General Services Administration. But the administration sidestepped this by saying that none of those agencies were responsible — only the EXR. Though the Trust then amended its complaint to include the EXR as a defendant, that couldn’t save a claim under the APA, because the APA applies only to agencies. So that neat little trick worked.
Next, the Trust amended their initial complaint to say that well, if the White House and the EXR and the president are the ones responsible, that’s a violation of the separation of powers. Under the Property Clause of the Constitution, only Congress has the power “to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States.” Then, the administration shifted again, saying it was not claiming Trump had any constitutional authority to build the ballroom, but rather that he was relying on several federal statutes.