After a 5-4 Supreme Court decision this week allowing the Trump Administration to build the 250 foot high “Triumphal Arch” next to Arlington National Cemetery, the Interior Department has announced that work will start in two weeks. Doug Burgum, Secretary of the Interior, wrote today that “We are preparing to start, over the next two-week period, the excavation work necessary.” The Arch will impact nine Civil War sites in Washington and Maryland and has been most criticized for blocking the view of the Lincoln Memorial and Robert E. Lee’s mansion. When the Lincoln Memorial was located in its present position it was seen as a symbol of reconciliation by uniting these two symbolic structures. The Arch will also interfere with people looking at Arlington National Cemetery from the District of Columbia side. The cemetery was created during the Civil War as a way to honor the dead Union soldiers buried there. The Arch is 86 feet taller than Paris’s famed Arc de Triomphe.
Burgum said that “This will be one of the Great Pieces of American Architecture, honoring the history and significance of Arlington Cemetery and befitting the most powerful Capital in the World.” Earlier this year President Trump said that the Arch is a tribute to himself. According to the Washington Post:
Administration officials have laid out an aggressive timeline to potentially complete the arch within two to three years, saying that crews would work 20 hours per day, year-round. Trump and his deputies also contend that they do not need approval from Congress because lawmakers authorized a somewhat similar project a century ago that was never built.
“It was meant to be built for many years,” Trump said in the Oval Office in May. “The land is owned by secretary, by the Interior Department. We don’t need anything from Congress.”
Democratic lawmakers have said that the arch must go through congressional review.
Lawyers for Public Citizen, a watchdog group that is representing the military veterans, have urged a federal judge to halt the project, too.
“Frankly, I’m befuddled as to what sort of legal authority the administration thinks it has behind it,” Nicolas Sansone, Public Citizen’s lead attorney on the case, said Thursday, citing the lack of final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission.
…Fifty-two percent of Americans are against the planned arch, compared with 21 percent who favor it, according to a Washington Post-ABC-Ipsos poll conducted in April.
“When completed, it will be, without question, the Greatest Arch of them all!” the president wrote on his Truth Social platform in June.
