In this week’s Elie v. US, our justice correspondent explains how the ballroom could gut key environmental protections. Plus, the heartbreak of Jason Arday.
I’m sorry, but we have to talk about the fucking ballroom. I assure you, I am not happy about this. The world is on fire, but I, and now you, need to devote actual mental energy to Donald Trump’s White House play space.
A brief recap for those blissfully unaware of how truly stupid this country has become. Trump tore down the East Wing of the White House without prior authorization from any of the relevant committees. In its place, he plans to erect a gilded ballroom worthy of his fatuous regime. He claims that the ballroom will include an underground security bunker.
The ballroom is flatly illegal. The White House is not Trump’s personal property, and it lies on federal land. Construction is not allowed on federal lands without explicit authorization from Congress, which Trump doesn’t have.
Lower courts have blocked construction of the above-ground portions of the project, but now Trump has appealed those rulings to the Supreme Court.
I was prepared to roll my eyes at the whole thing, waiting for the inevitable day when a new Democratic president destroys whatever Trump is able to build. But Ian Millhisier actually read the appeal and put the fear of God in me. Trump’s case could allow the Supreme Court to gut a key environmental protection, which could then allow Trump and the Republicans to trample all over national parks, national monuments, endangered habitats, and even endangered species.
The issue has to do with what’s known as standing, which is the legal jargon for the right to sue. Trump’s ballroom construction was stopped thanks to a lawsuit from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The group sued under a long-standing principle that allows lawsuits from people who intend to “visit” a site and will find it “less attractive” if alterations proposed by the government or the people running it are allowed to proceed.
It might sound thin, but this is an important way for the public to protect and preserve public parks and monuments. This kind of standing allows regular people to protect things and places that should belong to everybody.
Trump’s appeal directly challenges this kind of standing. If he’s successful, it will strip the public of a key way to enforce historical preservation and environmental protection laws. Trump could, quite literally, emboss his face on Mount Rushmore or turn Yellowstone into a golf course if this kind of standing is not upheld.
The Republicans running the Supreme Court have shown a deep antipathy toward both environmental protection and the ability of citizens to sue to stop the government.
Trump’s ballroom could easily turn into a national environmental disaster. And, as with everything the Trump administration does, the Supreme Court appears eager to help with the destruction.
The Bad and the Ugly
- In other terrible environmental news, the Trump administration has authorized the sale of a 31 million–acre tract of seafloor off American Samoa for deep-sea oil mining. The planned sale, which represents yet another depressing first (the first time this country has opened its waters for deep-sea plunder), threatens the precious and vulnerable ecosystem off the Rose Atoll. The administration is being sued, for now, by various conservation groups.
- Moving on to Trump’s abiding stupidity and incompetence, it turns out the National Park Service warned the Trump administration that the Reflecting Pool was peeling long before the administration launched its baseless vandalism case against innocent people.
- Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison is suing Texas Governor Greg Abbott to extradite an ICE agent who assaulted a man in Minnesota. Yes, we live in a world where criminal ICE agents can flee to Texas to escape legal consequences for their actions, because Texas is essentially a rogue state that provides refuge to paramilitary sadists.
- Meanwhile, ICE is now offering legal liability insurance to its people so they can, you know, violate people’s constitutional rights without breaking the bank.
- Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman has reduced the charges against a whistleblower cop who recorded his fellow officers making racial, ethnic, sexist, and homophobic slurs. Technically, recording people without their consent is illegal in California but… I think Hochman completely missed the point of these recordings. No word on whether he is going to do anything to the cops who were recorded calling women “rapeable,” among other horrors, or investigate them to see if their words were ever translated into criminal malfeasance or abuse.
Inspired Takes
- I saw Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey. I really liked it. The Nation’s Katha Pollitt saw it. She didn’t like it as much. Thing is, I agree with almost all of Pollitt’s criticisms. It’s just that none of these problems ruined my enjoyment of the movie. In related news, I understand and appreciate all the scientific criticism leveled at Project Hail Mary, and, similarly, do not give a shit about those criticisms and think it was a great movie. I also like all the Jurassic Park movies, even the objectively terrible ones. Maybe I should start my own movie review column called “Actually, It’s Fine.”
- In Talking Points Memo, Madiba Dennie explains how the Supreme Court is primarily responsible for the epidemic of sports betting in this country, thanks to its ruling in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. That case is an intellectual sore spot for me, because I remember agreeing with the court in real time and telling people who said that it would lead to an explosion of sports betting that they were being hysterical because the sports leagues themselves would never allow it. So, you know, I was very, very wrong.
Worst Argument of the Week
I was today-years-old when I learned that major international airports across the country have small washing stations to allow Muslim travelers to perform wudu, or wash their feet, hands, and arms in preparation for their five daily prayers. I think that’s neat. I tend to think of the airline industry as the industry that’s most openly hostile to its own customers, so learning about this small acknowledgement of the needs of millions gave me a fleeting sense of hope.
“Fleeting,” of course, because I learned about the washing stations’ existence only in the context of Christofascist bigots’ attempt to take them away. Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter last week to the heads of the Houston and Dallas airports declaring that the washrooms are discriminatory to everyone else and threatening to revoke their state grant funds.
It is a risible argument. Having a washroom designed to aid in a religious practice is not discriminatory toward other religions. That’s like saying having a kosher food option is discriminatory toward people who don’t keep kosher. Or having fish on a Friday menu is discriminatory toward people who aren’t Catholic. If anything, not having the washroom is a discriminatory attack on the free exercise of the religion of the people who need it.
What makes Abbott’s attack truly hypocritical is that… we’re talking about Greg Abbott here. We’re talking about a guy who is trying to force public schools to display the Ten Commandment in every classroom in his state. This is a guy who uses religious beliefs as an excuse to set bounty hunts on people fleeing his state’s clutches to get an abortion. Greg Abbott has long since blown past the free exercise of religion to arrive squarely at the unconstitutional imposition of one religion, his, above all others.
Alas, this doesn’t make him all that unusual. What Abbot is doing is straight-up bigoted, but it’s also perfectly in keeping with the rise and ongoing march of Christofascism. These people want to force the rest of us to live in a Christian theocracy.
In such a world, any acknowledgement or accommodation to another religion is seen as an attack on the majority faith. It is the worst kind of argument, but one that the bad guys always make.
What I Wrote
Trump is trying to change the Census. Again. This time he’s planning new tricks to undercount non-white people, locking in a warped view of America until 2040. I wrote about how Democrats must stop him.
In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos
Jason Arday, the youngest-ever Black professor at Cambridge University, was found dead this week at the age of 41. There’s no apparent foul play. Arday left his post at Cambridge following a “plagiarism scandal,” but I put that phrase in scare quotes because it seems like the allegations amounted to a few missed citations. Nonetheless, the man was hounded, disgraced, lost his job, and is now dead.
All I can say is, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The reality of being a Black public intellectual is that your credentials and intellect are constantly questioned by whites. There is no margin for error. You will not be allowed to recover from mistakes, and so you just can’t make them. You will not be allowed to fail up, you will just be pushed face down in the muck.
That’s… a certain kind of pressure. I don’t know how Arday dealt with it. I don’t know how any of us deal with it. I drink, to be honest. And I content myself with the knowledge that the anonymous portions of my life—my family, my video games, my sportsball teams—provide me with enough satisfaction that white people can take everything else away from me, and I’ll still be happy. I even have an outline for the novel I’ll write under a pen name when whites cancel me for whatever.
In The Nation, Jafari Sinclaire Allen writes about the machine that came for Arday, and comes for all of us. My only message to young Black writers and thinkers is to train yourself to never want something that only the white man can give. Because once they figure that out, they’ll make you a slave to it, or take it away.
That’s of course, easier said than done. I have a cross-stitch in my office that reads, “Don’t let these white people make you stroke out.”
***
If you enjoyed this installment of Elie v. U.S., click here to receive the newsletter in your inbox each Friday.