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The legal "defense" for Trump's ballroom is a joke
If everything is "national security," then nothing is.
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Last week, the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued the Trump administration over the White House ballroom project, saying the law requires that plans be reviewed and approved by two federal commissions and the construction must be authorized by Congress.
But according to the administration, construction can’t be halted for even the briefest moment — or our national security will be imperiled.
How does putting a pause on the Big Gilded Ballroom compromise national security? Well, the administration can’t say … because it would compromise national security.
It’s kind of a fool’s game to treat the administration’s court filings as legitimate legal arguments. That’s not only because Department of Justice attorneys are distressingly comfortable with deceiving judges and defying orders. It’s also because the administration doesn’t genuinely believe it should be required to justify or defend its actions, so instead of legal arguments, we just get assertions of raw, unchecked power.
The most blatant version of this is the administration’s favorite one to raise — namely, that President Trump gets to do what he wants because he is president. But the vague, fact-free invocation of national security is in the same category, albeit less obviously so. One is basically “you can’t tell us what to do,” while the other is more “we don’t have to tell you what we’re doing or why we are doing it.”
Legal mush
Indeed, in the ballroom case, the administration doesn’t bother to make a legal argument about national security at all. Instead, there’s just the bald assertion that there are “security concerns that warrant permitting the current below-grade construction to continue.”
The filing making that claim doesn’t deign to explain anything about those concerns. Instead, it just refers to a declaration from the deputy director of the Secret Service explaining that it “coordinates with the contractor on these temporary measures to ensure the security and safety of the President, the First Family, and the White House complex.” And though apparently the contractor has completed most of these, “improvements to the site are still needed before the Secret Service’s safety and security requirements can be met. Accordingly, any pause in construction, even temporarily, would leave the contractor’s obligation unfulfilled in this regard and consequently hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission.”
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You will note that none of this appears to refer to national security as such, but rather to the personal security of the president and his family. Certainly, the personal security of the president is a national security issue, but the Secret Service declaration says only that the contractor needs to do some more work to meet the Secret Service’s requirements for the safety of the president and his family.
The brain geniuses at the DOJ and the Secret Service do not seem to have realized that by saying the contractor still needs to do more work to make things adequately secure, they just told the world that the president and his family are not currently adequately secure and will only become so when a private contractor finishes some tasks. For an administration so very worried about security, that seems like kind of a bad thing to reveal?
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