The Supreme Court shot down a lawsuit trying to block President Donald Trump’s hugely unpopular White House ballroom project, and according to a new breakdown from The Hill, a “complicated” legal rule means that it is highly unlikely that anyone else will be able to stop it.
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In a 5-4 decision earlier this week, the Supreme Court ruled that the lawsuit brought against the Trump administration by the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked legal standing, allowing the project to continue. A lower court had previously ruled in the case, blocking the construction from continuing without congressional approval, something unlikely to happen given the ballroom’s toxic reputation with voters.
As reporters Zach Schonfeld and Sophie Brams explained for The Hill on Wednesday morning, it is entirely possible that a future plaintiff could have more luck if the court found that it had more standing, but also explained in-depth why this “complicated” rule meant that such a scenario would be highly unlikely.
“Courts have historically understood that to mean that a plaintiff must prove a concrete, particularized injury to have the right to sue in federal court. That injury must be imminent or already happening,” the pair explained. “In other words, the alleged harm must be real and specific, not abstract. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia famously put it, ‘what’s it to you?’ That can be a high hurdle … Standing doctrine is complicated, with many different tracks.”
The lawsuit attempted to argue that the preservationist plaintiffs had standing to oppose the ballroom due to “aesthetic” injury, suggesting that a “historic preservationist is aesthetically injured by the transformation of a historic building like the White House, just like an environmentalist suffers from an animal’s extinction.” The majority decision found that this argument amounted to mere “distaste,” and could potentially allow any U.S. citizens to sue against any project they do not personally like.
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In light of that argument, Schonfeld and Brams wrote that “it’s not clear anyone will” be able to convince the Supreme Court that they have sufficient standing.
“The court has occasionally allowed some pretty exotic forms of standing,” Georgetown Law professor David Super told The Hill. “But I think the greater likelihood is that this will only be litigated if a majority of at least one chamber of Congress decides that it is offensive.”
“With Republicans in control of Congress, there’s no current political will for Congress to try to assert standing as an institution,” the pair explained further. “And for any Democrats who want to try it alone, they’ll have to grapple with the limits the Supreme Court placed on individual lawmaker suits in its 1997 Raines v. Byrd decision. It leaves President Trump taking the win.”
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