In a 5-4 ruling issued on Monday, August 31, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by the National Trust for Historic Preservation — which challenged President Donald Trump’s ability to proceed with construction of a White House ballroom. According to SCOTUSBlog, the majority ruled that “the plaintiff likely lacks a legal right, known as standing, to challenge the project at all.” And Harvard University legal scholar Noah Feldman believes that the ruling has implications that go way beyond the ballroom itself.
The dissent found Chief Justice John Roberts in agreement with Democrat-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, while the majority consisted of GOP-appointed Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.
Feldman, in an op-ed for Bloomberg News, explains, “Over a dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by the Court’s three liberals, the Court’s five conservatives said that the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked standing to challenge the ballroom being built where the East Wing of the White House used to be. The unsigned opinion raises an obvious question — if the National Trust for Historic Preservation can’t challenge the destruction of a historic building, who can? — and a less obvious one: How is the White House like a crocodile?”
The Harvard legal scholar continues, “I’m not being facetious — Roberts actually does raise that second question. And the consequences of the first go beyond the narrow issue of who has the legal authority to challenge Trump’s architectural imperialism. More than any other Supreme Court decision in recent memory, this one narrows the grounds for federal lawsuits by watchdog groups. It’s so extreme, it goes much further to deny standing than even the late Justice Antonin Scalia did.”
Scalia, Feldman notes, denied “standing” in the 1992 case Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, which “involved a challenge to an EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) regulation.”
Feldman comments, “The vote that surprises me most in this case is that of Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who clerked for Scalia and ordinarily takes pains to make sure the Court interprets his views correctly.”
According to Feldman, the High Court’s ballroom ruling is “distressing” because it makes it “harder to sue the federal government in an emergency docket case that did not benefit from full oral argument or briefing.”
“Trump’s desire to act like an emperor, marring the Washington cityscape with disproportionately large triumphal arches and ballrooms, is offensive both aesthetically and symbolically; these are not monuments to democracy,” Feldman writes. “The Court’s ballroom decision is disappointing for deeper reasons: It weakens the capacity of the judiciary to keep the president within the limits of his legal authority. In so doing, it undermines the rule of law itself.”