Episode notes
Alison Hoagland has lived on Capitol Hill since 1977, about two miles from the White House. She's an architectural historian, a professor emerita at Michigan Tech, the author of six books on American vernacular architecture, and a former senior historian at the Historic American Buildings Survey, the National Park Service program that documented the White House itself. She's been a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation for more than forty years and now sits on its board. She swore in a declaration that she walks through Lafayette Square about once a month and will keep doing it.
On August 31, in an unsigned 5–4 order, the Supreme Court held that the government is likely to show she has no injury a federal court can hear. The Trust had relied on her declaration and nobody else's, so with her out, two lower-court rulings on whether the president needed Congress's permission to demolish the East Wing go unreviewed, and the ballroom keeps going up.
Gwen and Marc work through both halves of the order and the Chief Justice's dissent, then set the case beside Bost v. Illinois State Board of Elections, decided seven months earlier by the same Court, where a congressman who won his last race with 75 percent of the vote did have standing to challenge how ballots are counted.
In this episode:
- The 1912 statute at the center of the case: no structure in federal public grounds in D.C. without express authority of Congress, and whether a maintenance appropriation supplies it
- Why the litigation runs against the Park Service at all, and the government's shifting position on who was actually building the ballroom
- Two parallel tracks, APA and ultra vires, and what happens when the decisionmaker isn't an agency
- Valley Forge, FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, and the line between an injury and a strong objection
- Laidlaw, Summers, and Lujan: why aesthetic injury counts for a river or a species, and why the majority says a building is different
- Sierra Club v. Morton to Lujan to this order, and the argument that the bar keeps moving once a plaintiff clears it
- The Chief Justice's dissent: the crocodile, Teddy Roosevelt's 1902 message to Congress, and the fact that nobody fishes in the White House
- The equities half of the order, the security declarations, and the dissent's footnote quoting the government against itself
- Bost: candidates, the hundred-meter dash, Justice Jackson's dissent on generalized grievances, and Justice Barrett's narrower pocketbook route
- Why the doctrine lets two reasonable justices sort the same plaintiffs in opposite directions
- What Congress can still do, and why timing may make that academic
Whether the difference between losing a river and losing the view of a building is a principled distinction or just the same fact described twice is, more or less, the whole case.
Tags: standing, Article III, National Trust for Historic Preservation, White House ballroom, Bost v. Illinois, Lujan, Sierra Club v. Morton, Laidlaw, aesthetic injury, emergency docket, administrative law, Supreme Court