The Supreme Court today lifted a lower-court injunction against continued construction of a ballroom at the White House.
The ruling allows construction of the ballroom to continue while the case moves forward in the courts on the merits.
The preliminary ruling says only that the plaintiff lacked standing to challenge construction of the ballroom; it doesn’t say anything about the underlying merits–whether construction is lawful.
The Court ruled that the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States lacked standing to sue on the ground that one of its members, Alison Hoagland, a Trust member and academic expert on historic American architecture, suffered an aesthetic harm in seeing the construction. The Court said that it hasn’t previously recognized standing in a case like this, where a person asserts “mere offense, disagreement, or distaste” with a defendant’s behavior. The Court said that recognizing standing in a case like this would destroy the “concrete-and-particularized injury requirement” for Article III standing.
The Court distinguished a line of environmental-protection cases where it recognized standing based on harm to aesthetic interests. It said despite those rulings a plaintiff must nevertheless “show that its claimed injury is ‘concrete and particularized.’” According to the Court, “a plaintiff’s ‘distress at or disagreement with’ a defendant’s actions does not clear that bar.”
The Court went on to say that the balance of stay factors favored the Administration. (The Court’s deference to the Administration’s asserted national-security interest is notable, especially because, as the dissent points out in a footnote, “the Government informed the District Court that its construction work on below-ground secure facilities was ‘driven by national security concerns independent of the above-grade construction’ of the ballroom.”)
Chief Justice Roberts dissented, joined by Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson. He started by noting that the ballroom was likely unlawful, because Congress didn’t authorize it. He then argued that Hoagland had standing on the basis of her aesthetic harm under the Court’s environmental-protection cases.
Hoagland’s injury suffices for standing. A historic preservationist such as Hoagland can be aesthetically injured in a concrete, particularized way by the transformation of a historic building that she frequently enjoys, just as an environmentalist can sustain a concrete, particularized aesthetic injury from the extinction of a particular animal or the transformation of a particular forest or river that he regularly enjoys. With the Court’s rejection of Hoagland’s standing today, however, it now is the case that “I want to look at a crocodile” can adequately answer the ever critical “what’s it to you?” question of Article III standing, while “I want to look at the White House” cannot–no matter how distinctive the particular viewer’s interest in looking at it may be.
So if the Trust and Hoagland don’t have standing, who does? Congress may be able to assert standing to sue on the ground that the Administration is acting contrary to validly enacted law (by Congress). Don’t look for that to happen with this, Congress, though. Maybe the next one . . . .