A federal judge wants answers on the tarp and scaffolding at the Kennedy Center

President Donald Trump’s name is off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, but the judge who ordered the center to be restored to its proper name wants to know why tarp and scaffolding are still covering it.

In a new order on the court docket Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper demanded answers on “the purpose for and status of the tarp and scaffolding that [Trump and his fellow] Defendants have erected on the front portico of the Center, to the extent they remain” by the court-ordered deadline of July 31 or within seven days of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees meeting, whichever is sooner.

Cooper, an Obama appointee in Washington, said that information must appear in a joint-status report due by that time from the parties in the case brought by Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, a member of the center’s board who serves “ex officio” by virtue of her position in Congress and who was a trustee at the time of the center’s purported renaming.

The judge also said the forthcoming joint-status report “shall apprise the Court of any pertinent factual developments as to plans for future construction and operations at the Kennedy Center.”

In a lengthy opinion last month, Cooper concluded that the board “overstepped its statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming the Kennedy Center after President Trump.” He said that Congress “gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

The administration failed to convince an appeals court to keep Trump’s name on the building while it challenges Cooper’s order. Litigation is now proceeding before both Cooper and the appeals court, where Beatty said earlier this week that Trump and his co-defendants are “still hanging a tarp over the Kennedy Center’s restored façade in petulant defiance.”

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