President's emergency motion: please let us keep building the ballroom while we figure out the war.

OK. Hon. On Saturday. During the Iran war. On day thirty-six of the bombing campaign. While the Pentagon was still trying to recover a weapons officer who ejected over Iranian airspace, the White House Counsel’s office filed an emergency motion with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Not, Buddy, about the war. About the ballroom.

The ballroom, you’ll remember, is the four-hundred-million-dollar event space the President is building on the site of the East Wing, which the President’s crews started demolishing in October, which the National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing over, on the grounds that the East Wing of the White House is not the President’s personal real-estate project. A district judge, a Bush appointee, ordered construction stopped by April 14 until Congress authorizes the rest. The administration, on Saturday, filed an emergency appeal asking the appeals court to vacate the order.

The legal argument, in the filing, is roughly, we cannot stop building because there is a national-security bunker under the event space and halting construction creates national-security risk. The appeals court, on Saturday, read this argument and replied, roughly, the prior order specifically said the bunker is exempt and you can keep working on it. You filed an emergency motion arguing for permission you already had, against an order that did not actually stop you from doing the thing you say is urgent.

I have been in real estate. I have been in zoning fights. I have seen a man file an emergency motion to keep paving a parking lot the town told him not to expand, and then the town tells him we said you could keep the lot, just not the new lot, and the man still runs around saying they shut me down. I have seen this play. I know this guy.

What is strange about Saturday, hon, is that this is the legal motion the West Wing wanted to file urgently. Not, for example, please file an emergency War Powers update. Not please file the Pentagon’s response to the downed F-15E. The most urgent thing on the Saturday docket, during the war, was the event space.

Buddy. You ever notice how the war keeps being a war but the ballroom keeps being the fight?

Funny how that works.