A lawsuit by nine Kennedy family members poses the toughest legal test yet for President Donald Trump’s planned Washington arch, legal analyst and former prosecutor Harry Litman argues.
In a post on his Talking Feds Substack, Litman says the family is asking a court to stop a 250-foot arch planned for Memorial Circle. He says the structure is big enough to hide Arlington National Cemetery from view across the river. The nine plaintiffs descend from Robert and Ethel Kennedy.
Litman says Trump’s building projects have survived so far because the administration contests each plaintiff’s right to sue. In August, he notes, the Supreme Court lifted a block on the White House ballroom after finding the plaintiff probably had no standing. It didn’t decide whether the ballroom was lawful.
He argues the Kennedys’ claim to a personal injury is the strongest any court has seen in these cases. John F. Kennedy’s grave was sited to line up with the Lincoln Memorial, and Litman says the family selected its designers and spent over $600,000 on it. Family members still go there, frequently in the early hours before the cemetery opens. According to their complaint, the arch would put the graves in shadow and permanently diminish the site.
Litman also cites a 2004 ruling in which a unanimous Supreme Court sided with Vince Foster’s relatives, who wanted photos of his death scene kept private.
“With the arch, Trump may have met his match,” Litman writes.
He acknowledges a risk. The claim rests on a non-financial injury, a theory he says the court’s conservatives accept only reluctantly. He calls the case the ultimate test of it.
On the merits, Litman says the family is on firm ground. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will hear their motion, temporarily stopped work on the arch in a case brought by D.C. and Virginia. He says she has signaled that federal law required Congress to sign off first.