Washington — A federal judge on Thursday pressed lawyers for Ohio Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty and the Justice Department on new efforts by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Board of Trustees to add President Trump’s name back onto the building’s facade.
Lawyers for Beatty, who sued last year over Mr. Trump’s changes to the Kennedy Center, argue that the board’s recent efforts to recognize the president violate federal law, and they asked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to issue emergency relief blocking the changes.
Cooper quickly convened a hearing to consider Beatty’s request but did not issue a decision. The Kennedy Center’s board has agreed not to take any action until Sept. 8, though the judge swiftly questioned Brantley Mayers, a Justice Department lawyer, as to why it had to move so soon.
“What does that have to do with what Congress intended?” Cooper asked of the fast-approaching deadline.
Hours after the hearing ended, the Justice Department said in a filing that the Kennedy Center board would not move forward with its plans to recognize Mr. Trump on the building until Oct. 8, pushing back its timeline by a month.
The board, which is chaired by Mr. Trump and composed of his Cabinet members and allies, approved a resolution earlier this month that calls for the inscription “Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump” to be placed under the center’s name on the building and for the inscription “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund” to be added if a $100 million fundraising threshold is met. The resolution also calls for the Kennedy Center’s grounds to be named the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
Nathaniel Zelinsky, a lawyer representing Beatty, called the board’s vote to again put Mr. Trump’s name on the center “deja vu” and an act of “outright defiance” of an order from Cooper earlier this year that barred the center’s closure and ordered Mr. Trump’s name to be removed from the building.
“They are doing the same thing they were told they couldn’t do before,” Zelinsky said, calling the board’s move this month an “attempt to end-run your order.”
The board voted late last year to rename the Kennedy Center to “The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” and the president’s name was added to the building soon after. But construction crews removed the president’s name from the facade in June after Cooper’s ruling. Since then, the front portico of the building has been covered by a construction tarp, concealing most of its name.
Zelinsky has said that the marble on the building was damaged as a result of the new inscription.
But Mayers, counsel to the associate attorney general, told Cooper that the Kennedy Center is in “structural and financial disarray,” echoing assertions made in a filing Tuesday. In court papers, the Justice Department warned the performing arts institution may have to be demolished if it cannot be closed for two years for renovations.
“There is no renaming here,” Mayers repeatedly argued in court. He said the Kennedy Center board moved to inscribe Mr. Trump’s name in the facade and plaza because of ongoing and future fundraising efforts by the president to supplement congressional funds for the center.
“President Trump is a successful fundraiser,” Mayers said.
The Justice Department had argued in filings that the center’s “dangerously dilapidated, outdated, and decrepit” conditions and millions of dollars in financial losses put the living memorial to President John F. Kennedy in a “financial and structural death spiral” that will require it to close for renovations.
“Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down, with a determination to follow on what to build on the site, such as a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River that has been proposed, by some, for many years,” lawyers for the federal government wrote.
But Cooper told Mayers that the claims about the physical state of the Kennedy Center were a “nonsequitur,” since he is tasked with deciding whether the board’s attempt to put Mr. Trump’s name back on the building complies with federal law.
Still, he also questioned lawyers for both sides on whether he still has jurisdiction over the case, since the Trump administration appealed his earlier decision in favor of Beatty.
Cooper had previously ruled that “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.” He wrote then that no other individual other than Kennedy can be memorialized on the center’s front portico.
There are no official existing plans to tear down the almost 55-year-old performing arts center. But the warning could raise the stakes in a monthslong legal dispute over the center, which Mr. Trump and his handpicked board of trustees have sought to overhaul.
Beatty was seated next to her legal team in the courtroom. When he took the bench, Cooper joked to the congresswoman that the ongoing legal battle “may have been more than you bargained for when you joined this suit,” prompting laughter from the courtroom.
Ahead of the hearing, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he had “no idea” whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to tear down the center, and called adding Mr. Trump’s name to parts of the center’s campus “the right thing to do.”
“What I can’t figure out is why we’re in this courtroom,” Lutnick said.
The secretary remained in the courtroom for the entire hearing and spoke with Justice Department attorneys during a brief break in the proceedings.
Lutnick is not a member of the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, but his wife, Allison, is.
