Judge grills feds over bid to reinstall Trump’s name to Kennedy Center

Filed 46m ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Designed by Edward Klauck. · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

A federal judge held a hearing Thursday over whether the Kennedy Center board's vote to reinstall Trump's name on the building's facade violates his May order removing it, after Rep. Joyce Beatty filed an emergency motion to block a plan to install the inscription by Sept. 8.

The proposed language reads “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund” beneath JFK's name, with the surrounding complex renamed “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.” A DOJ attorney argued this counts as a funding acknowledgment, not a memorial, and that Congress's 1983 ban on additional memorials applies only to the building itself — leaving the garage, plaza, and other structures fair game for naming after any president or donor.

Judge Cooper pressed the government on whether the board could therefore name the garage after Obama and the complex after Bush, essentially putting every parcel up for grabs; the DOJ attorney agreed, and separately suggested naming a parcel after Cooper, who declined the offer. The plaintiff's attorney compared the government's threat to demolish the center if blocked from renovations to mafia-style intimidation, while noting contractors already drilled into the building's marble once installing the sign in December.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

There is something clarifying about a legal theory that concedes every square foot of a national memorial is available to the highest bidder, so long as the bid is dressed up as gratitude. A building named for one president is now argued to contain, in its garages and plazas, an infinite supply of loopholes — which is less a reading of the statute than an inventory of the merchandise. When the government's fallback position is that it might simply knock the place down, the desk stops pretending this is a dispute about signage.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: Magic Escape Room · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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