As a journalist, I have a standing headline I use that goes, “Federal Judge Issues Restraining Order Against Trump’s Plan to [Fill in the Blank].” And as you can imagine, if you’ve been following President Donald Trump’s second term at all, you know that headline format gets used a lot.
It seems there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t need it. That said, was rather unexpected when a report dropped Tuesday evening that a federal judge in D.C. decided not to stop construction on the Trump ballroom, even with a lawsuit from the activist group, the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
They asserted that the administration commenced construction prior to submitting plans to the National Capital Planning Commission and did so without engaging Congress. But that argument wasn’t enough to move U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, at least for the time being:
A federal judge on Tuesday turned down preservationists’ request to halt President Donald Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project, concluding that allowing below-ground construction to continue in the coming weeks was unlikely to produce irreparable harm to those opposed to the plan.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon denied the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s request for a temporary restraining order, but said he would hear arguments early next year about whether to issue a longer-term preliminary injunction against the project.
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi took to social media to hail the victory, even if it might be shortlived:
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“We will continue defending the President’s project in court in the coming weeks,” she declared – likely with the knowledge that another left-wing group somewhere is already shopping for a left-wing judge to file their case and stop the project again.
With that in mind, Leon’s ruling came with some requirements the Trump administration must comply with:
The Trump administration told U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on Tuesday that within the next “two weeks” it expects to meet with the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts to review plans that Justice Department attorney Adam Gustafson told the court were not yet finalized.
Tad Heuer, the national trust’s attorney, quipped that with this administration, “It’s always going to happen in the next two weeks.”
“The court will hold them to that,” the judge responded. “They have until the end of this month.”
What’s especially frustrating here is that today’s left-wing Democratic political apparatus wants everyone to believe Trump is the first president to dramatically alter the physical appearance of and facilities within the White House. Here’s a spoiler: He isn’t. That’s also true of the ballroom Trump is trying to add; that idea is actually more than a century old, as in, from the time of President Benjamin Harrison, our 23rd president (1889-1893):
Back then, the idea was to build two identical ‘wings’ alongside the original White House, one of which would have contained a ballroom. However, the Harrison administration didn’t have the funding – which would have come largely from tariffs, by the way. Trump, meanwhile, isn’t spending a dime of federal money and has his project entirely funded by private donors.
It’s been almost embarrassing to watch leftists and Democrats melt down over the cost of Trump’s new ballroom — a project that, inconveniently for them, is being paid for entirely with private money. The faux outrage is especially rich when you remember that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was snoozing at the switch while hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were siphoned off through massive fraud in federally funded nutrition programs overseen by his state.
And then there’s California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who can always be counted on to fire off smug, self-righteous social media shots at Trump. Newsom loves to sneer about the ballroom, but somehow can’t manage to explain how much a sprawling state capitol construction project — funded by taxpayers, no less — is costing Californians, even though it’s rising practically in his own backyard.
Apparently, private money spent transparently is scandalous, while public money burned in the shadows is just business as usual for Democrats.
The legal battles related to Trump’s major initiative will persist, but for one day, it was refreshing to report that a federal judge opted not to obstruct the agenda of the legitimately elected president.
