A federal judge has warned the Donald Trump administration not to start building the president his triumphal arch without providing formal notice first.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Thursday the administration would break ground despite an ongoing lawsuit and court order requiring two weeks’ heads up.
The Vietnam veterans who brought the suit asked a judge on Friday to block construction, and on Friday evening Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the government to “provide the court with 48 hours’ notice before engaging in any activity on Memorial Circle other than on-site information gathering.”
Chutkan also warned that any construction or demolition without formal notice “would be a violation” of her orders.
The plaintiffs in the case, three Vietnam veterans and an art historian, had said in their Friday motion that the “imminent course of action that Secretary Burgum has announced to the American people is unlawful many times over.”
The plaintiffs have argued the construction would disrupt views between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. And they pointed to federal laws barring construction, including one disallowing buildings to go up on federal land in D.C. without federal approval, and another specifically requiring Congress to authorize construction in the area where Trump wants the arch.
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But the Trump administration has been emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision to throw out a case against Trump’s ballroom construction, which had essentially the same legal problem, because five Republican justices reckoned the plaintiffs in the ballroom case didn’t have legal standing to sue. The Justice Department told the court on Thursday the Vietnam veterans’ case should go the same way.
Chutkan previously said, in an April order, the administration couldn’t break ground without first providing two weeks’ notice on its website and to the court itself, which it has not done.
“What I do not want is for ground to be broken while this case is pending,” Chutkan said during a hearing that month.
A major difference between the ballroom case and the arch case is that the plaintiffs sued over the arch before construction had begun, whereas Trump’s surprise demolition of the East Wing of the White House prompted a lawsuit after the fact. The plaintiffs told Chutkan on Friday she should not allow the government “to blaze ahead with an unlawful course of conduct in the hope that they can render the arch a fait accompli before this Court has had the chance to reach a final determination as to whether Defendants’ project is authorized by law.”
Burgum argued on social media, as the Justice Department has in court, that Congress already authorized the arch in the early 1900s, regardless of the more restrictive statutes lawmakers have put in place more recently.
There’s virtually no chance lawmakers will authorize a giant arch to help Trump in his Washington redecorating spree. Senate Republicans rejected funding for the White House ballroom earlier this year.