As a former businessman, I’m pretty decent with coding, so I created a macro that automatically types out, “Federal Judge Issues Restraining Order Against Trump’s Plan to… [fill in the blank.]”
All right, I’m exaggerating, but I could have — I feel not a day goes by when a jurist doesn’t come along and, as RedState’s Bonchie likes to say, “jump in off the third rope” to kneecap a Trump initiative. It was quite surprising, then, when news broke Tuesday evening that a D.C. federal judge declined to block construction on the Trump ballroom, despite the lawsuit from an activist group, the National Trust for Historic Preservation. They declared that the administration broke ground before plans were submitted to the National Capital Planning Commission and did so without consulting Congress.
It wasn’t enough to move U.S. District Judge Richard Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, at least for now:
A federal judge on Tuesday turned down preservationists’ request to halt President Donald Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project, concluding that allowing below-ground construction to continue in the coming weeks was unlikely to produce irreparable harm to those opposed to the plan.
U.S. District Judge Richard Leon denied the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s request for a temporary restraining order, but said he would hear arguments early next year about whether to issue a longer-term preliminary injunction against the project.
Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the win, even if there are more battles to come in the case:
We will continue defending the President’s project in court in the coming weeks.
As I mentioned, the battle isn’t over, and the administration will need to provide updates to the judge on schedule:
The Trump administration told U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on Tuesday that within the next “two weeks” it expects to meet with the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts to review plans that Justice Department attorney Adam Gustafson told the court were not yet finalized.
Tad Heuer, the national trust's attorney, quipped that with this administration, “It’s always going to happen in the next two weeks.”
“The court will hold them to that,” the judge responded. “They have until the end of this month.”
The Left acts as if Trump is the first president to ever think of modernizing and renovating the White House, but it's not so:
Now Trump and private donors are paying to make it happen.
It’s been pathetic to see leftists and Democrats whining about the cost of Trump’s massive ballroom — even though it’s entirely privately funded — even while Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was asleep at the wheel when hundreds of millions of dollars were defrauded from federally funded nutrition programs run by the state. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, criticizes the ballroom project in his endless mean tweets, but he himself is unaware or unwilling to reveal how much a massive state capitol project is costing taxpayers, even though it’s being built right down the street from his office.
The court proceedings over the big project will continue, but it was nice for one day at least to write that a federal judge actually declined an opportunity to derail the duly elected president’s agenda. As my grandmother might have said, "Wonders will never cease.”