The Supreme Court granted, 5-4, the Trump administration a stay that stopped construction of the White House ballroom.
Earlier this month, the the D. C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a preliminary injunction blocking construction of the White House ballroom.
Just the appeals court, SCOTUS did not grant the stay based on the legality of the construction.
The majority concluded that the administration will likely succeed in a lawsuit brought against the National Trust for Historic Preservation since it “lacks standing to challenge the East Wing Project.”
The Trust attempted to establish standing on a declaration by member Alison Hoagland (citations omitted):
Hoagland says that she lives in Washington, D.C., and expects to visit the neighborhood around the White House “about once a month.” She asserts that having to view the finished ballroom the government is constructing would cause her to suffer “injuries” to her “aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests” because she finds the “scale,” “height,” and “massing” of the government’s design distasteful. On the strength of that declaration, the Trust contends, it has Article III standing to challenge the East Wing project.
“This Court has not found standing in circumstances like these before,” wrote the majority. “To the contrary, we have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury under Article III.”
In fact, SCOTUS cited a few cases that set the standard for standing: “Instead, to secure standing a plaintiff must identify some concrete and particularized injury ‘other than the psychological consequence presumably produced by observation of conduct with which one disagrees.’”
Considering how everything offends at least one person nowadays, I guess we cannot change anything.
Even SCOTUS thought of that (omitted citation):
Perhaps nearly any government action or project offends someone’s sensibilities. And adopting the Trust’s “unprecedented and limitless” view that offense alone suffices to establish a concrete and particularized injury would seemingly usher in a world where “virtually every citizen had standing to challenge virtually every government action that they do not like—an approach to standing that this Court has consistently rejected as flatly inconsistent with Article III.” Absent some considerable revision to our existing standing doctrine, then, the government is likely to succeed on the merits.
The majority also wrote that “[T]he district court likely excessed its Article III authority to enjoin the activities of a coordinate branch of government.”
“And courts may not exceed the bounds of their lawful authority simply because they may think another branch has exceeded its own,” they added.
Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the three leftist justices.
Roberts wrote that the ballroom’s “construction is likely unlawful.”
Roberts cited 40 U.S.C. §8106, which states that “Congress has explicitly prohibited the construction of any “building or structure…on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.”
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