There are only so many times you can stand in federal court and insist that up is down, black is white, and bulldozing a historic wing of the White House is just a light home improvement project before a judge decides he’s had enough.
This week, in the ongoing “White House ballroom” litigation, which to my continual shock is not a Veep subplot but actual reality, Judge Richard Leon finally let the exasperation show. (Also known as the case brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation over the Trump administration’s unilateral demolition of the East Wing of the White House to build a $400 million White House ballroom — funded privately — with exactly zero Congressional approval or oversight.) And when the judge starts openly questioning your relationship with reality… it’s not exactly a great sign for the government’s case.
At issue remains the Trump administration’s apparent belief that the White House is less “seat of government” and more “HGTV fixer-upper.” According to reports, the latest hearing made clear that the Department of Justice is still clinging to its argument that knocking down the East Wing to make room for a grotesque ballroom somehow qualifies as a mere “alteration.” That thesaurus-based violence will not stand in Judge Leon’s courtroom, he said calling the demo “an alteration… takes some brazen interpretation of the laws of vocabulary.”
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Yikes. That can’t feel great.
And if the DOJ thought it could smooth things over by analogizing the White House to national parks, welp, Leon was equally unimpressed. The White House, he reminded everyone, “is a special place,” and this isn’ swapping out a park bench at Yellowstone. Leon went even further, emphasizing a point that seems almost quaint in this litigation, that no matter how much cheap gold paint Donald Trump bathes the place in, he is not the owner of the White House, he’s the current “steward” of an “an iconic symbol of this nation.”
Leon described the government’s “shifting theories and shifting dynamics” which has become the defining feature of the case. One minute it’s an alteration, the next it’s justified by vague statutory authority, now the plaintiffs don’t have standing (which Judge Leon described bitingly as the DOJ’s “escape hatch”), and last month it somehow had “national security implications,” a claim that felt less like a legal argument and more like someone hitting the break-glass-in-case-of-losing button.
But it’s clear that Judge Leon is not buying whatever the government is selling.