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Attorneys for Kennedy Center ex-officio board member Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, are seeking an emergency hearing after the center was closed to the public late yesterday.
The lawyers for Beatty, the ex-officio board member who’s been challenging Trump’s plan to close the center for two years while it undergoes repairs, argued the center’s attorneys initially told them it had been closed yesterday because of an errant fire alarm.
In a court filing today, Beatty’s attorneys said that not only is the center closed, but gates have been put up outside and construction is underway inside — actions they say appears to violate an earlier court order in the case. That order barred a previous attempt to to close the center without signoff from the judge.
Rep. Joyce Beatty addresses a crowd gathered as workers put up scaffolding prior to the removal of Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center on June 12.<!–> t=di–>Craig Hudson for The Washington Post / Getty Images file<!–>
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“Given the unexplained and unlawful closure, it is possible Defendants intend to undertake immediate steps in order to make public access practically impossible for the foreseeable future, including by demolishing public avenues of access to the building, and thereby evade the Court’s order by fait accompli,” attorney Nathaniel Zelinsky writes in the filing.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper gave the government until 10 a.m. ET tomorrow to respond. “The Court will schedule a prompt hearing if necessary after reviewing the response,” he added.
The board voted yesterday to immediately shutter the center.
Cooper ruled in late May that a March vote to close the center was taken “without a meaningful effort to confirm the wisdom of a recommendation that could adversely affect the Center in numerous ways for years to come.”
He said that the plan couldn’t be carried out “until the Board approves any closure consistent with the Court’s Memorandum Opinion, and the Court issues a further Order dissolving or modifying this preliminary injunction.”
Beatty’s filing said the judge reiterated that position at a hearing yesterday ahead of the vote, and it now “seems Defendants may be violating the “clear and unambiguous order of the Court.”
The Trump administration is likely to argue it is not in violating the order, viewing the board’s vote yesterday as separate from the one in March.
Cooper dismissed a similar argument in a ruling yesterday about the board’s revised effort to add the name of its chairman, President Trump, to the building’s facade, finding it was using “linguistic gymnastics” to try sidestep his ruling.
Despite the closure, the board said some programming will continue inside a physically separate, newer, and much smaller building on the Kennedy Center’s campus. There are free events scheduled between Thursday and Sunday each week over at that building, called ”The REACH.”