By Mike Scarcella
WASHINGTON, May 29 (Reuters) – A judge on Friday ordered the removal of President Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ruling that the iconic Washington venue cannot be renamed without an act of Congress.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington directed the Trump administration to take down all physical signage bearing Trump’s name and to eliminate any references to a “Trump Kennedy Center” from official materials within 14 days.
“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” Cooper wrote. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
The judge said his decision “does not purport to dictate how the Center should be run, nor does it prescribe any particular plan for the institution — construction, closure, or otherwise — moving forward.”
Cooper ruled in a lawsuit brought by Ohio Democratic U.S. Representative Joyce Beatty, a member of the Kennedy Center’s board by virtue of her position in Congress. Beatty in a statement after the ruling said the “Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s plan to renovate the center is part of a broader push by the Republican leader to reshape Washington’s monumental core. He also intends to erect a 250-foot (76-meter) arch and to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom at the site of the demolished East Wing of the White House.
Those efforts also face court challenges. A federal appeals court has allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with building the ballroom as it considers the case.
Cooper’s order also stops the Trump administration’s planned two-year closure of the building. The judge said his order does not prevent the Kennedy Center from moving forward with planned capital repair work that the record in the lawsuit “demonstrates is sorely needed.”
The board could still close the center, Cooper wrote, “should it come to this decision anew after independently balancing its multiple obligations to the Center in a prudent fashion.”
Beatty sued the Trump administration in December, calling the renaming of the building “a flagrant violation of the rule of law” that “flies in the face of our constitutional order.”
Her lawyers in a statement applauded Cooper’s decision. “This is a powerful blow against the Trump administration’s corruption,” attorneys Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky said.
The Kennedy Center opened in 1971 as a living memorial to the late President John F. Kennedy.
(Reporting by Mike Scarcella; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Edmund Klamann)
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