Judge asked to take Trump name off Kennedy Center |
Judge asked to take Trump name off Kennedy Center
A Democratic lawmaker has asked a federal judge to stop the Kennedy Center from sticking President Trump’s name on its building and other branding.
Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), an ex officio member of the performing arts center’s board of trustees, argued in a motion filed Wednesday that Congress plainly established former President John F. Kennedy as the center’s namesake.
“There is no clearer or more significant breach of fiduciary duty than the Board flouting the central purpose of the institution it is charged with protecting and which Congress enshrined into law: to maintain the Center as a memorial to John F. Kennedy — and to no one else,” her lawyers wrote in a motion for partial summary judgment.
Beatty sued Trump and other board members in December over efforts to “rename, shutter and gut” the Kennedy Center. Her lawsuit came days after the board, hand-picked by Trump, voted to change the institution’s name to include Trump’s, and the building’s signage was updated.
Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, her lawyers, wrote in the filing that Trump and the board have not spelled out a “coherent defense of their nakedly unlawful actions” to date.
They pointed to the statute that established the Kennedy Center, which says, “The Board shall construct…a building to be designated as the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” and argued that the word “designated” makes it clear that Kennedy’s name should be the solo namesake.
The law’s language further establishes that trustees must “assure” that “no additional memorials or plaques in the nature of memorials shall be designated or installed” in the center’s public areas, they said, contending that the three exceptions — plaques acknowledging a gift from a foreign country, plaques on a theater chair or box acknowledging it was a gift or any inscription on certain walls of the center — don’t apply here.
“None of these narrow exceptions permit the trustees to add President Trump’s name to the Center’s façade — above President Kennedy’s name — and to rebrand the Center as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center,'” Eisen and Zelinsky wrote.
Beatty is also seeking to block Trump’s plan to shut down the Kennedy Center for two years to “completely rebuild” it. A federal judge earlier this month allowed the Ohio Democrat to participate in the board meeting where the plan was formalized but did not order them to allow her to cast a vote on the looming shutdown.
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