“Silence was not an option,” Ohio U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty said after winning a federal lawsuit against Donald Trump and his self-appointed board at the Kennedy Center that reversed the renaming of the Kennedy Center and blocked its closure.
The Columbus Democratic representative is one of 23 ex officio members of the Kennedy Center board who serve by virtue of their positions in federal or local government. But Beatty had no say in the Trump name-change.
When she tried to object to the rebranding — that defied a congressional statute — she was muted. Literally. On a quorum call. Infuriating? You bet. She could have raged to no end. Resigned herself to a regime that has relentlessly steamrollered the rule of law into seeming irrelevance. Shrugged off a new name on an old building as trivial in the big picture of rapid authoritarian descent in America. But that’s how free people succumb to lawlessness and adapt to brazen tyranny.
Beatty chose to push back. Last Friday the Ohioan was vindicated in a federal court ruling that ordered Trump’s name removed from the Kennedy Center and a temporary halt to plans to shutter the building while renovations continue.
A small victory for the rule of law in the most corrupt presidency in 250 years of American history? Yes. But it mattered, stressed Beatty’s lead counsel Nathaniel Zelinsky.
Trump seized control of the iconic cultural institution in Washington last year, replaced multiple board members with lap dogs, made himself chair and had his name carved over The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
What people saw hammered into the stone edifice of the national landmark — that Congress designated as a living memorial to a slain president in 1964 — was “a visible mark of authoritarianism,” Zelinksy argued. “It’s something that’s more appropriate for Moscow or Pyongyang than it is for Washington, D.C.”
At some point, he added, those tangible signs of corruption blend into other cases people can see and easily grasp from the bulldozed East Wing of the White House to the billion dollar ballroom, Trump banners hanging on the U.S. Justice Department and other government buildings and the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund Trump set up with the DOJ to reward his supporters, including Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
“If you treat these things that are in our national trust with such disdain,” said Zelinsky, “you’re going to treat all of the other elements of the office, of the presidency that you hold, the trust placed in you by the American people with a similar disdain.”
That’s why public pushback matters.
On the same day that Beatty’s lawsuit prevailed in U.S. District Court in Washington, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily barred Trump’s corrupted DOJ from moving forward with the massive slush fund the department created to resolve a bizarre IRS lawsuit Trump filed against his own administration.
And another federal court in Florida ordered a review of that sketchy Trump litigation (as a pretext to the slush fund agreement?) in response to a motion filed by 35 retired federal judges. They alleged that the settlement “is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the court.”
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams wants to know whether Trump defrauded her court by suing the IRS for the sole purpose of forcing a sweet deal to make payouts to his political allies and shut the door on the government’s pursuit of tax claims against the president, his family and their companies.
But her scrutiny was prompted by pushback in defense of the rule of law.
In Virginia, plaintiffs who pushed back won an injunction on slush fund payouts and their Democracy Forward attorneys called the order a triumph for the rule of law.
“No administration has the authority to spend public money through a political rewards program that Congress never authorized.”
And it took an Ohio congresswoman on the Kennedy Center board, who would not be silenced, to score another win for the rule of law against Trump’s illegal rechristening of a national treasure.
As a trustee she sued to protect the institution she was charged with overseeing.
Beatty then amended her lawsuit to also challenge Trump’s abrupt decision to close the center for renovation after his disastrous takeover triggered widespread operational chaos, leadership purges, mass layoffs, artists boycotts, severe financial and attendance declines, and intense congressional scrutiny.
The Kennedy Center board, stacked with Trump cronies, rubber-stamped both the closure and putting Trump’s name on the prestigious venue meant to honor the 35th president in perpetuity with world-class performing arts, major exhibits and education.
But in Beatty v. Trump, U.S. District Judge Casey Cooper concluded the law establishing the center over five decades ago “makes it crystal clear that it is to be named for President Kennedy and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorials based on the board’s unilateral say-so.”
He gave the center two weeks to get Trump’s name off the building, website, signs, and marquee events.
The judge also found the board had not properly considered the ramifications of a two-year closure of the facility when they were invited to the White House to sign off on the preordained plan.
In short, the court said Kennedy Center trustees flouted the will of Congress and Donald Trump is not above the law. Let them appeal. Even a modest vindication of the rule of law under authoritarian power grabs matters.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
