Babyman tantrum due any minute.
A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts could not honor President Trump with an inscription on the institution’s exterior, blocking an effort by the center’s board to restore the president’s name to the building.
“Simply put, defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington wrote in the order. “The board resolution bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”
Yebbut he fixed it up! You gotta give him credit for that!!
The center first affixed the president’s name to the building in December, after its Trump-allied board voted to add it to the institution’s formal title in recognition for his role in securing $257 million for a sweeping renovation project.
In May, Judge Cooper ruled that the renaming as the Trump-Kennedy Center was unlawful and could only be decided by Congress, which had authorized the creation of the center and its dedication to President Kennedy. The judge ordered the letters spelling out the president’s name removed from the marble.
As it pursued an appeal, the center complied.
But last month its board voted to restore Mr. Trump’s name in a different form, aggressively testing the judge’s previous order. The resolution approved by the board proposed an inscription under the building’s main signage that would read “renovated and restored by President Donald J. Trump.”
Which is so dumb. It’s an interruption, a change of subject, an irrelevance. The memorial to Kennedy is a memorial because he was assassinated. Who came along and tidied it up 60+ years later is entirely beside the point.
Since the president took over the institution at the start of his second term, it has seen waves of cancellations by artists, plummeting attendance by audiences and withdrawal of support from some donors.
Well…ok…so can we put his name on it in recognition of that?
The board’s decision to recognize Mr. Trump with an inscription was an effort to find a workaround to a provision in the federal law governing the Kennedy Center that says “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed in the public areas.”
There’s no room for a workaround there. Not so much as would let a flea get in.
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