When the Supreme Court doesn’t want to decide on the legality of some issue, it often finds that a plaintiff lacks “standing” — that is, doesn’t have sufficient interest in the issue to merit the court’s involvement.
Today, the five Trump-sympathizers on the court allowed construction to continue on Trump’s 90,000-square-foot luxury White House ballroom, which has been steadily rising to replace the White House’s East Wing that Trump tore down last fall.
The five said the preservationists who challenged the construction of the planned ballroom lacked standing to bring their lawsuit because they were not directly harmed by the project.
That lawsuit was brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit chartered by Congress to guard public buildings. If this organization (and its longtime member, Alison K. Hoagland, an architectural historian) doesn’t have standing to complain about Trump’s mayhem on the People’s House, I can’t imagine who would.
Congress might have standing, but the current lily-livered Republicans now in control of Congress would never seek to stop Trump’s ballroom. They want to be invited to it.
I was interested that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined with the court’s three Democratic-appointed justices in dissent, saying the construction was “likely unlawful.” He reasoned that because the White House is “an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” it’s important that “those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”
By the majority’s pathetic logic, Trump could raze the entire White House and put up a Trump tower in its place, or take down the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument and erect monuments to himself, and no one would have standing to complain.
But presumably the opposite logic also holds. If a future Democratic president wants to demolish Trump’s ballroom, no one (other than maybe Congress) would have standing to complain.
I think this is exactly what the next Democratic president should do, by the way. He or she should resurrect the People’s House by obliterating Trump’s ballroom as a symbol of the billionaire class that briefly ran Washington, and give away small chunks of its concrete and rebar to average Americans — just as small chunks of the Berlin Wall were given away.
What do you think?
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.