Judge halts Trump’s arch after federal panel approves it
A federal judge late Thursday halted construction on President Donald Trump's planned 250-foot-tall triumphal arch, siding with military veterans and local government officials who had urged her to stop the project.
U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan blocked work on the arch for two weeks while the court considers challenges to its legality. Three Vietnam War veterans, a historic preservationist, the D.C. government and the Commonwealth of Virginia sued to halt construction.
Chutkan's ruling came about an hour after a federal commission approved Trump's arch and briefly cleared a path for the controversial project. The judge, an Obama appointee, said that D.C. and Virginia had demonstrated they were likely to be harmed by the arch's effects on traffic and other disruptions.
Chutkan also criticized the Trump administration's arguments, writing that officials' recent assertion that the arch was necessary for national security was "belated and unsupported." And she mocked the administration's central claim that Congress authorized Trump's arch a century ago, when lawmakers approved a somewhat similar project that was never built.
"The sheer improbability that a 100-year-old statute would contain authority, unknown to every previous administration, to erect a 250-foot arch at a principal location in the Nation's capital indicates how far Defendants must stretch to justify this project," Chutkan wrote in her order.
Chutkan declined to rule on the claims brought by the Vietnam War veterans and the historic preservationist, after Trump officials argued that they could not prove they were harmed by the arch.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb (D), Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) and other critics of the project quickly hailed the judge's ruling.
"This is a critical first step as we fight to protect the District and its residents from the serious, irreparable harm that this illegal construction project would inflict," Schwalb said in a statement. "The facts and the law are on our side - such brazen federal overreach cannot stand."
Trump has been determined to complete the project, and his allies on the National Capital Planning Commission gave final approval earlier Thursday night to the memorial after more than eight hours of public testimony and heated debate.
The monument would rise in Memorial Circle, a traffic roundabout tucked inside Washington's boundaries, and Trump administration officials had said construction could begin immediately after the commission's vote.
"I believe more than ever that this triumphal arch should be approved by this commission," Mark Paoletta, a White House official who chairs the commission, said at the hearing's conclusion.
The project's opponents had turned to the courts, beseeching Chutkan to stop work before it starts.
"The Court should not allow this lawless project to evade scrutiny," Schwalb and Jay Jones, the attorneys general for D.C. and Virginia, respectively, wrote in a joint court filing Wednesday.
More than 120 members of the public, including architects, historians and military veterans, urged administration officials on Thursday to abandon the towering monument, saying it would wrongly overshadow nearby Arlington National Cemetery, interrupt the solemn corridor between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial, and violate federal law because the current Congress has not authorized it.
" I cannot imagine driving there and being faced with bulldozers and cranes constructing this monstrous arch. The noise, the traffic, the chaos," said Ginge Sivigny, who said her husband and his parents are buried in the cemetery. "I'm 80 now, and after three and a half years of construction, I may not be able to resume my visits."
Trump officials who lead the commission were unmoved.
"This important site that we're talking about is little more than a tired traffic circle. It's a patch of grass, ringed by a curb," said Stuart Levenbach, a Trump appointee who serves as the commission's vice chairman. "The proposed arch would transform this place into a monumental gateway."
D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D), who also sits on the National Capital Planning Commission, said he could not support the project given conflicting information provided by Trump and his deputies - including Trump's comments to reporters last year that the arch would honor "me" - and because he believed it violated federal laws.
"It is invalid to say this arch was authorized by Congress , " Mendelson said, noting that lawmakers a century ago envisioned a pair of columns symbolizing the nation's reunification after the Civil War - a different plan than what the administration is pursuing. He also warned that the project could hamper emergency evacuation from Washington and called for the vote to be postponed. Trump officials rejected the request, saying approval was urgent.
"We want a decision tonight," said Kevin Lilly, a Trump appointee at the Interior Department, which is managing the project.
Trump has spent more than a year touting his plan for the arch, which he says is needed to commemorate the nation's 250th anniversary. The current Congress has not authorized the project, and opponents argue it would violate multiple federal laws, overwhelm the site and wrongly overshadow the national military cemetery.
The Trump administration says building the arch will complete the century-old vision for the site that Congress had authorized. The president extolled the arch again Wednesday while touring another one of his projects, a new White House ballroom, and touted his continued efforts to remake Washington.
The triumphal arch is "like the Arc de Triomphe, but better, more beautiful actually, much more beautiful," the president told reporters at the White House, invoking the Parisian arch that inspired his own.
Thursday's speakers included four lawmakers who split on whether the arch should be approved, several Vietnam War veterans who said it would harm their experience of visiting the military cemetery, and advocacy groups that urged Trump to stop the project.
Many called the planned structure and site unsuitable. The representative of an architects association criticized Trump's design, and the head of the D.C. Preservation League said the towering structure would violate a federal law limiting the height of new D.C. buildings. A leader of DarkSky DC, which advocates reducing light pollution around the Washington area, warned that Trump's plan to light the monument at night would create a "glare bomb" that would change the region's night sky.
"This commission's own 2001 Memorials and Museums Master Plan rules out Memorial Circle for a memorial ," Bryan Clark Green, an architectural historian, told the panel.
Multiple speakers, including some with family members in the cemetery, cited a Washington Post analysis that the arch would cast shadows on thousands of graves.
Paoletta countered Thursday that the arch would honor veterans by filling the empty space at Memorial Circle. He also praised Trump's "historic vision" and said the project would provide "a generational security opportunity" to protect the capital.
Trump last month added more political appointees to the commission, including the Interior Department's Lilly and the Pentagon's Ricky Buria. Six of the panel's 12 seats are controlled by Trump, and two more are held by his GOP congressional allies, who have swiftly approved the president's past projects. Lilly, a veteran, said Thursday that he supported the arch because it honored America's ideals and military service.
GOP Reps. Andrew Clyde (Georgia) and Brian Mast (Florida) joined the hearing to argue that the arch should move forward. Both men are military veterans, and the Trump administration has contended that the arch would honor veterans rather than impose on the cemetery.
Democratic Reps. Jared Huffman (California) and Beyer called the project illegal, portrayed it as a monument to Trump and said the administration needed to submit the plans to Congress for approval.
Huffman's comments drew a response from Paoletta, and the two men argued for several minutes about the intent for Memorial Circle and the nearby Arlington Memorial Bridge. Paoletta said the Democratic congressman was wrongly characterizing the scope of the original, century-old construction plan, citing correspondence from long-ago officials.
"This is tortured stuff," Huffman told Paoletta. "Why don't you take your shot with Judge Chutkan on this one? … I feel pretty good about where that's going to come down."
Chutkan, who has been weighing two lawsuits against the arch, has ordered the Trump administration to provide immediate updates about the project's status and construction plans. She has also voiced skepticism of Trump's national security arguments for the project, saying officials have failed to provide evidence for that purpose and suggesting that the administration should not invoke national security as a "talismanic" justification for controversial projects.
"What is the harm of waiting?" Chutkan asked a Justice Department official last Friday, as she heard dueling arguments from the administration and lawyers for Vietnam veterans and a historic preservationist. "What is the rush to put this arch up?"
The D.C. government and the Commonwealth of Virginia sued the next day, contending that the project would impede traffic, interfere with emergency evacuation planning and cause other disruptions. Trump officials have argued that the alleged harms are too speculative and that the challenge should be thrown out.
The administration has closely guarded its plans for some of Trump's projects and has declined to release the names of contractors teed up to work on the arch or how it will be paid for.
A vehicle bearing the logo of a division of Grunley Construction, a local firm that has worked on the White House's Eisenhower Executive Office Building and other government buildings, was seen at the site on Tuesday, according to a photograph posted by independent journalist Andrew Leyden.
The Interior Department and Grunley Construction did not respond to requests for comment about whether the company is involved in the project. The Justice Department late Wednesday said in a court filing that Grunley Construction "may be - but is not necessarily" preparing for work on the project.
Trump officials previously told Chutkan that contractors were prepared to fence off Memorial Circle and begin staging supplies nearby as soon as the arch was approved by the National Capital Planning Commission, and the Interior Department formally authorized the project shortly afterward.
Beyer, who represents the Virginia district that includes Arlington National Cemetery, said in a statement late Thursday that Chutkan's ruling would "properly restrain" Trump after the administration attempted to "ram this project through." He also called for a permanent halt to the arch.
"This fight is not over," Beyer added.
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