Washington — A federal judge on Thursday sharply questioned attorneys for Rep. Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat, and the Justice Department over the Kennedy Center board’s latest push to restore President Trump’s name to the landmark performing arts center’s exterior.
Beatty’s legal team, which sued last year after Mr. Trump moved to reshape the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, contends the board’s new plan to honor the president runs afoul of federal law. Her attorneys asked U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper to grant emergency relief that would stop the proposed changes from moving forward.
Cooper scheduled a prompt hearing on the request but left the matter unresolved. The Kennedy Center board has pledged to hold off on any action until Sept. 8, although the judge immediately pressed Justice Department attorney Brantley Mayers on why the board believed it needed to act on such a short timeline.
“What does that have to do with what Congress intended?” Cooper asked, referring to the looming deadline.
The board, chaired by Mr. Trump and made up of Cabinet officials and political allies, adopted a resolution earlier this month that would place the words “Renovated and Restored by President Donald J. Trump” beneath the Kennedy Center’s name on the building. The measure would also add “Endowed by the Trump Kennedy Center Fund” if fundraising reaches $100 million, and it seeks to rename the center’s grounds the “President Donald J. Trump Plaza.”
Nathaniel Zelinsky, an attorney for Beatty, described the board’s vote to again put Mr. Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center as “deja vu” and accused trustees of showing “outright defiance” of Cooper’s earlier order, which barred the center’s closure and directed that 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 told the court, characterizing this month’s board action as an “attempt to end-run your order.”
The dispute follows a vote late last year to rename the institution “The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” Mr. Trump’s name was added to the building not long afterward, but construction crews removed the president’s name from the facade in June after Cooper ruled in the case. Since then, a construction tarp has covered the building’s front portico, obscuring much of the Kennedy Center’s 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.
