Alarm swept the Kennedy Center's defenders hours before a hearing to consider a threat by President Donald Trump's board to tear down the center if his name was not added to the building.
In a motion filed later Wednesday afternoon, lawyers for Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) accused the board of holding the building hostage. Beatty is ex officio trustee on the board through her seat in Congress and sued last year after crews put Trump's name on the marble facade.
"[T]he administration is now threatening in federal court to LEVEL the Kennedy Center if Trump does not get his way," Norm Eisen, a Democracy Defenders Action co-founder and one of Beatty's attorneys, wrote on social media, the Guardian reported. "His path of destruction knows no bounds."
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper takes up her emergency request at 2 p.m. Thursday. He will decide whether the board can put Trump's name back on the building. Beatty's filing was in response to the Justice Department, which told Cooper on Monday that the center would have to be torn down rather than renovated.
"Without those efforts, the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down," Justice Department attorney Brantley Mayers wrote.
Mayers floated "a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River" as a replacement, conceding it would "fail to adequately honor" John F. Kennedy.
"In plain English, Defendants have not-so-subtly said: 'What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it,'" Beatty's lawyers wrote. "This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop."
The board damaged the building's one-of-a-kind marble the last time it mounted Trump's name, and the administration has not disputed it, the reply said.
Unless Cooper acts soon, the lawyers wrote, the board is "poised to do further harm to the Kennedy Center's historic façade."
Hands Off the Arts, a group of more than 2,800 activists, told the Guardian the filing amounted to a demand that the judge allow Trump "to hijack JFK's memorial or I will turn it into a crater." The group pointed to the demolished White House East Wing.
Cooper ruled in May that only Congress can rename the center, the reply noted. The board voted 20-3 on Aug. 13 to try again anyway, the Guardian reported.
"Defendants consciously chose to play a dangerous game of chicken with the law," Beatty's lawyers wrote, calling the effort a "slavish attempt to corrupt the Kennedy Center at all costs."
"And now they have threatened the destruction of the Kennedy Center, a sacred memorial to a fallen President, all in the name of one man's vanity," they wrote. "Enough is enough. This has to stop."