The White House — the People’s House — can’t fit many people in its walls for special events, so it must pitch a tent about one football field away from the building for major functions. Event capacity is capped at 200 people in the White House’s East Room. It has been a problem for more than 150 years, according to the Trump administration. Now Trump is using around $300 million in private money to make the White House more welcoming, and the left is pretty mad about it.
Why? From the leftists’ perspective, it’s as bad as terrorists murdering 2,977 people on Sept. 11, 2001.
The entire East Wing of the White House will be modernized and rebuilt to go along with a new ballroom, spanning 90,000 square feet, with capacity for 650 guests.
If the left could find a legal reason for suing President Donald Trump for breathing, they would already be in court, so of course, a couple surfaced Thursday night, Charles K. Voorhees and Judith A. Voorhees, filing a case at the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, seeking a temporary restraining order (TRO) and “other equitable relief.”
Yes, they would rather see a pile of the East Wing’s rubble littering the White House lawn than see the successful construction of the beautiful building depicted in the renderings the White House shared before it broke ground.
They want the administration to stop the construction process and get approvals from five oversight entities. According to the Voorheeses, the White House must first do the following:
Provide final plans to the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC); consult with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) to assure the plans are not violating the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA); meet with the D.C. State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) “to mitigate any adverse effects;” and consult with the Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), “which reviews and advises on the design and aesthetics of the exterior modifications to the White House and its grounds,” according to the filing.
This is the stuff of nightmares for anyone who has tried to put a shed in their backyard or paint a front door in a historic district and needed permission from city hall or the architectural review board for the color of paint. There are layers of bureaucracy, restrictions, and opinions enforced by people who are not footing the bill and will not be affected. It can take months or years to ram a project through an unfriendly review process. If we know anything about Trump’s opposition, it is that they love to get in the way of progress.
In this case, they want the White House plans to be reviewed and approved or modified by the NCPC, the ACHP, the SHPO, and the CFA and then to undergo a public review process by the National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP).
Where were they months ago when Trump announced this project? Let them continue to gnash their teeth while one of the preeminent builders of our time uses zero taxpayer dollars to improve the People’s House. He is not slowing down.
“President Trump has full legal authority to modernize, renovate, and beautify the White House – just like all of his predecessors did,” Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, told The Federalist in an email — still working while the government is shut down.
The average American has almost no chance of being invited to Richard Nixon’s 1970 bowling alley, Gerald Ford’s swimming pool, Barack Obama’s basketball court, or the mystery cocaine stash found in Joe Biden’s White House. Those were mostly self-serving pursuits to be enjoyed by a few White House occupants. But unless the left can find a way to stop Trump, some lucky members of the public, along with world leaders, will get more use out of the opulent new ballroom than the previous offices, as the People’s House will finally accommodate more people.
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