President Donald Trump’s allies are heading into a Thursday hearing in Washington facing an accusation of mounting a “delusional” and “breathtaking assault on the rule of law.”
The allegation comes from Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, who already successfully sued for the removal of Trump’s name from the facade of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The judge who ordered that removal, Obama appointee Christopher Cooper, set the hearing on Beatty’s emergency motion to block the Trump-backed center’s board from carrying out what she called an attempt to defy Cooper’s order by voting to return Trump’s name to the center.
After the court-ordered removal in June, the board voted on a resolution this month that would put Trump’s name back on the center with two inscriptions. Below Kennedy’s name, it would add “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump,” as well as “endowed by The Trump Kennedy Center Fund” when the endowment of that fund reaches $100 million. The board also voted to name the physical site the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
The board has agreed to hold off on taking those actions only until Sept. 8. Urging Cooper to halt them by then, Beatty, who serves on the board as an “ex officio” member by virtue of her position in Congress, said the “artificial” deadline created an “unnecessary fire drill for all involved.”
In her emergency motion, she noted that federal law establishes the center as a “living memorial” to Kennedy alone, and that in ordering the prior removal of Trump’s name, Cooper observed that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.” She called the effort to nonetheless return Trump’s name to the center “a new and breathtaking act of defiance of Congress and of this Court.”
Opposing her motion in a filing this week, Trump administration lawyers maintained the legality of the resolution while calling Beatty “seemingly motivated by a partisan end to ensure the Kennedy Center does not succeed under President Trump’s leadership.” They painted the center as being in dire need of saving by Trump, even raising the possibility that it may have to be “taken down” if the board is blocked from carrying out its desired renovations.
“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years,” they said, adding that such a replacement “will fail to adequately honor President John F. Kennedy, but would be simpler and more economical to build, operate, and maintain.”
They said that an order blocking the board from “appropriately recognizing President Trump will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop.”
In her final reply on Wednesday ahead of Thursday’s hearing, Beatty called that a threat that amounted to them saying: “What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it.”
She called it “a breathtaking assault on the rule of law” that is “delusional” and “must stop.”
She also called the administration’s characterization of Trump as the center’s savior “not true,” citing Washington Post reporting for the proposition that the center “is in serious financial distress because of” the effort to rebrand the institution in Trump’s image.
While reiterating her arguments that the resolution is illegal and openly defiant of Cooper’s prior ruling in the case, Beatty urged the judge to quickly block that defiance. She said that to “do anything less, in this enormously consequential and closely watched case, would reward Defendants’ underhanded tactics and undermine public faith in our system of justice.”
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