RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday asked the Supreme Court to allow him to continue construction of a sprawling ballroom adjacent to the White House. The emergency application follows an Aug. 7 ruling by an appeals court in Washington upholding a federal judge’s decision that would block aboveground work on site while litigation moves forward. “If allowed to go into effect, the injunction would wrongfully install a single district judge as sole arbiter of what further construction is ‘strictly necessary’ to protect the safety of the President, his family, staff members, and visitors to the White House, including foreign dignitaries, and presidents and prime ministers of other countries,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in the filing. The appeals court decision has yet to go into effect, meaning construction continues while the Supreme Court decides what to do next. The deadline for the justices to act is Aug. 21, with Sauer asking the court to act immediately. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld an injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Richard Leon. Leon said that the White House could move forward with below-ground construction of security and medical facilities, but not the ballroom itself. The administration immediately appealed, and his ruling has not gone into effect. One key issue in the case is whether the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which brought the underlying lawsuit, has legal standing to sue based on its members being harmed by construction of a building they object to on aesthetic grounds. The group’s claim rests on a declaration made by member Alison Hoagland, a long-standing preservationist who lives in Washington and serves on the organization’s board of trustees. She regularly walks near the White House and said she would “suffer both professional and personal injuries, including to my aesthetic, cultural and historical interests, if a ballroom of the proposed form and scale were constructed.” In the new filing, Sauer said the project is now 65% complete, with a superstructure five stories deep and 70 feet high. A 250-person crew is working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, he said. No taxpayer funds are being used, Sauer added, with the project funded by $400 million in private donations. (Comcast Corp., the parent company of NBCUniversal, is one of the donors.) Sauer dismissed Hoagland’s claim, saying that the “subjective displeasure of an offended observer does not amount to concrete injury.” The trust on Friday issued a statement saying that the administration is “actively attempting to outrun the courts” by continuing construction, and called for the Supreme Court to reject Trump’s request.
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