What a Nile crocodile case means for Trump’s DC building projects

Rula Rouhana/Reuters/File

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision backing President Donald Trump’s massive ballroom at the White House is already playing into challenges over his other pet projects and has renewed a debate over a legal doctrine tied to an abandoned California ski resort and crocodiles in Egypt.

Over the objection of Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals, five conservative justices last week barred a historic preservationist from suing over the $400 million ballroom for “aesthetic” reasons. The Trump administration has rushed to use that decision to shut down lawsuits against the president’s other construction plans for the nation’s capital.

At the heart of some of those cases are questions about the scope of “aesthetic standing,” or the idea that Americans have a right to sue in some instances based on changes that deprive them of the enjoyment of seeing a landscape, for instance, or an endangered animal.

Trump argues that critics suing over his projects have not met that seemingly subjective standard. And when it came to his ballroom on the White House grounds, five justices agreed.

“This court has not found standing in circumstances like these before,” the court wrote Monday in a 5-4, unsigned decision , which allowed Trump to continue work that is already well underway. “We have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury.”

In the days since, the Justice Department quickly inserted that Supreme Court order into lower courts reviewing the president’s 250-foot arch proposed on a bank of the Potomac River and an effort to remodel a public golf course in Washington, DC.

Other cases, such as the administration’s beleaguered effort to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and to paint an iconic Gilded Age government building near the White House, have also raised questions about standing. On Friday, federal court reviewing the Reflecting Pool case ordered a new round of briefing in light of the ballroom ruling.

The challenge with aesthetic standing, said Robert Pushaw, a professor at Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law, is that “aesthetic injury is a gut call.” That’s because, he said, aesthetics are a matter of personal taste and inherently subjective.

Because it came in an emergency docket case, the court’s decision Monday technically has limited precedential value.

“But the case does indicate where five conservative justices are going, and they might be inclined in a later case to either reject aesthetic injuries or limit them to plaintiffs challenging environmental laws,” Pushaw said. “Either way, however, plaintiffs suing over alleged legal violations will have great difficulty establishing standing.”

Around the same time the Supreme Court was tightening standing rules for federal courts in the 1970s, the justices introduced the idea of aesthetic standing in a case challenging a Disney ski resort in Sequoia National Park.

In that case, Sierra Club v. Morton, Justice Potter Stewart wrote that “aesthetic and environmental wellbeing” are “important ingredients of the quality of life” and are not less deserving of legal protection than “economic wellbeing.”

The plaintiff in that case, the court ruled, ultimately did not have standing to sue. (The ski resort was nevertheless later abandoned.)

In his dissent Monday, Roberts also cited a 1992 decision challenging foreign aid for a project that wildlife groups feared would affect the habitat of the endangered Nile crocodile.

In that case, a 6-3 court concluded the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue, but not before the court wrote that “of course” the desire to “use or observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes” is “undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.”

With the court’s rejection of the ballroom lawsuit Roberts wrote, “it now is the case that ‘I want to look at a crocodile’ can adequately answer the ever critical ‘what’s it to you?’ question” of standing, but that “‘I want to look at the White House’ cannot.”

If the historic preservation groups and their members don’t have standing to sue, it’s not clear who does and whether Trump’s projects can be stopped by federal courts.

But groups and experts who have closely followed the growing disputes over Trump’s projects say there remains plenty of room for those challenges to continue despite the high court’s ballroom decision.

Nicolas Sansone with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, and the lead attorney challenging the arch, told CNN the case is different.

“Irrespective of how we view that analysis on its own terms, we believe that our case presents meaningfully different facts and we’re prepared to explain those factual distinctions to a district court,” he said in an interview before the administration announced its plans to break ground on the arch.

Sara Bronin, a George Washington University law professor who served as chair of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation during President Joe Biden’s administration, said the court’s decision in the ballroom case “makes it harder, but not impossible, for preservationists to use litigation to force the federal government to follow its own rules to protect historic places.”

Plaintiffs challenging those projects, she said, “will just need to more fully articulate the ways the challenged action harms or will harm them.”

Trump and his supporters have argued the theory of standing raised by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the ballroom case would have allowed virtually anyone to stop a government building project just because they didn’t like the design.

“The National Trust for Historic Preservation artificially created standing from one member’s opinion who said the completed building would diminish her personal enjoyment of visiting the White House,” Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador, a Republican, told CNN.

“Activists cannot be allowed to manufacture standing from personal displeasure and use it to stop any project they oppose,” he said.

Trump has repeatedly said the same, in coarser language, all year.

“There is absolutely no argument that a woman walking her dog in the vicinity of the White House has STANDING to stop such a desperately needed National Security structure for the people of the United States of America, as it will provide Presidents, current and future, a secure space to do their jobs, especially when she never saw the Building, because it had not risen, and she had no rendering, or pictures of the Building because they, also, were in the formative stages of production,” the president wrote in a Truth Social post last month .

CNN’s Sunlen Serfaty and Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.

鲁拉·鲁哈纳/路透社/档案照片

最高法院以 5 比 4 的投票结果支持唐纳德·特朗普总统在白宫建造大型宴会厅，这一决定已经引发了对他其他心头好项目的挑战，并重新引发了关于与加州废弃滑雪场和埃及鳄鱼相关的法律原则的辩论。

尽管首席大法官约翰·罗伯茨和三位自由派大法官反对，但五位保守派大法官上周以“美观”为由，阻止了一位历史保护主义者就耗资4亿美元的宴会厅提起诉讼。特朗普政府急于利用这一裁决，阻止针对总统在首都其他建设项目提起的诉讼。

这些案件的核心问题在于“审美地位”的范围，或者说，在某些情况下，美国人有权基于剥夺他们欣赏风景或濒危动物等乐趣的变化提起诉讼。

特朗普辩称，批评者就他的项目提起诉讼，并未达到他那看似主观的标准。而当涉及到他在白宫草坪上建造的宴会厅时，五位大法官也同意他的观点。

“本法院此前从未在类似情况下认定原告具有诉讼资格，”法院周一在一份5比4的未署名裁决中写道，该裁决允许特朗普继续推进已进展顺利的工作。“我们曾多次裁定，仅仅是冒犯、分歧或厌恶并不构成具体且特定的损害。”

此后几天，司法部迅速将最高法院的这项命令提交给正在审查总统在波托马克河岸边拟建的 250 英尺高拱门以及华盛顿特区公共高尔夫球场改造计划的下级法院。

其他一些案例，例如政府备受争议的林肯纪念堂倒影池修缮工程以及白宫附近一座标志性镀金时代政府建筑的粉刷工程，也引发了人们对诉讼资格的质疑。周五，负责审查倒影池案的联邦法院鉴于宴会厅案的裁决，下令进行新一轮的案情陈述。

佩珀代因大学卡鲁索法学院教授罗伯特·普肖表示，美学地位的挑战在于“美学损害的判断往往依赖于直觉”。他解释说，这是因为美学属于个人品味范畴，本质上是主观的。

由于这是一起紧急案件，法院周一的裁决在技术上具有有限的程序价值。

“但此案确实表明了五位保守派大法官的立场，他们或许会在以后的案件中倾向于驳回美学损害赔偿请求，或者将其限制在挑战环境法的原告身上，”普肖说。“但无论如何，就所谓违法行为提起诉讼的原告都将很难确立诉讼资格。”

大约在 20 世纪 70 年代，最高法院收紧联邦法院的诉讼资格规则的同时，大法官们在挑战迪士尼在红杉国家公园滑雪度假村的案件中引入了审美诉讼资格的概念。

在塞拉俱乐部诉莫顿案中，波特·斯图尔特大法官写道，“审美和环境福祉”是“生活质量的重要组成部分”，并且不亚于“经济福祉”而更值得受到法律保护。

法院最终裁定，该案原告不具备诉讼资格。（尽管如此，该滑雪场后来还是被废弃了。）

罗伯茨在周一的异议意见中还引用了 1992 年的一项决定，该决定质疑一项针对野生动物保护组织的援助项目，该项目的援助可能会影响濒危尼罗鳄的栖息地。

在这种情况下，法院以 6 比 3 的投票结果裁定原告没有诉讼资格，但在此之前，法院写道，“当然”，想要“使用或观察某种动物，即使纯粹出于审美目的”也是“毫无疑问的、可认定的诉讼资格利益”。

罗伯茨写道，随着法院驳回舞厅诉讼，“现在的情况是，‘我想看鳄鱼’可以充分回答一直以来至关重要的‘这关你什么事？’这个问题”，即诉讼资格，但“‘我想看看白宫’却不能。

如果历史保护组织及其成员没有资格提起诉讼，那么谁有资格提起诉讼，以及特朗普的项目能否被联邦法院阻止，目前尚不清楚。

但密切关注特朗普项目争议不断升级的团体和专家表示，尽管最高法院做出了舞厅裁决，但这些挑战仍有很大的空间继续下去。

公共公民诉讼集团的尼古拉斯·桑索内是挑战拱门的首席律师，他告诉 CNN，此案有所不同。

“无论我们如何看待该分析本身，我们认为我们的案件提出了截然不同的事实，我们准备向地方法院解释这些事实差异，”他在政府宣布拱门破土动工计划之前接受采访时说道。

乔治·华盛顿大学法学教授萨拉·布罗宁曾在乔·拜登总统执政期间担任历史保护咨询委员会主席，她表示，法院在舞厅案中的裁决“使得文物保护主义者更难，但并非不可能，通过诉讼迫使联邦政府遵守其自身保护历史遗迹的规则”。

她表示，对这些项目提出质疑的原告“只需要更充分地阐明被质疑的行为已经或将会如何损害他们。”

特朗普及其支持者认为，国家历史保护信托基金在宴会厅案中提出的“站立理论”实际上允许任何人仅仅因为不喜欢设计就阻止政府建筑项目。

“国家历史保护信托基金人为地根据一位成员的意见制造了这种地位，该成员表示，建成后的白宫会降低她个人参观白宫的乐趣，”爱达荷州共和党籍总检察长劳尔·拉布拉多告诉 CNN。

他说：“不能允许激进分子利用个人不满制造声势，并以此阻止他们反对的任何项目。”

今年以来，特朗普用更粗俗的语言反复表达过同样的观点。

“毫无疑问，一位在白宫附近遛狗的女士有资格阻止美国人民急需的国家安全设施的建设，因为该设施将为现任和未来的总统提供一个安全的办公场所，尤其是在她从未见过这座建筑的情况下，因为当时它还没有建成，她也没有任何效果图或照片，因为这些也都处于建设的初期阶段，”总统上个月在 Truth Social 上发帖写道。

CNN的Sunlen Serfaty和Tierney Sneed对本报道亦有贡献。