Arlington National Cemetery Viewshed Protection Act, preventing Trump's 250-foot arch
.jpg){kind=link}
Sometimes, the 630-foot Saint Louis Gateway Arch just isn’t enough.
What the bill does
The Arlington National Cemetery Viewshed Protection Act would prevent a planned 250-foot arch in Washington, D.C. heavily associated with President Donald Trump.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA8) – who represents the Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia where the planned arch would be located – introduced a House version on May 29.
Eight days earlier, the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts approved the arch on May 21, though Trump had recently stacked the commission entirely with his own appointees.
Context
The Trump administration is proposing a 250-foot-tall monument called the United States Triumphal Arch, to be built in Memorial Circle, on a bridge between Virginia’s Arlington National Cemetery and D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial.
For comparison, 250 feet would be more than twice the height of the Lincoln Memorial and more than 4x the height of the White House.
The project has been instigated by Trump, although the current plans wouldn’t actually depict Trump, such as with a statue of him for example. Nor would it be named after Trump, as he’s renamed several other D.C.-area buildings or institutions after himself, like renaming the Kennedy Center as the Trump Kennedy Center.
What supporters say
The legislation’s supporters argue that the president shouldn’t build what is widely perceived as a monument to himself, right next to a space honoring Americans killed in war.
“Arlington National Cemetery is sacred ground, the resting place for some of our nation’s greatest heroes. It is unthinkable that we would desecrate this hallowed space to build a monument to Donald Trump’s ego,” Rep. Beyer said in a press release. (To be clear, the arch would technically be built just outside the cemetery itself, in a traffic roundabout.)
“Trump’s vanity project would waste taxpayer money, brazenly violate existing law, and become yet another vehicle for his corruption,” Rep. Beyer continued. Specifically, he claims the project violates the Commemorative Works Act of 1986, which requires congressional approval for new D.C.-area monuments or memorials.
What opponents say
The legislation’s opponents counter that the monument is visually beautiful, fulfills the centuries-old original proposal that D.C. display such an arch, and wouldn’t block any existing views.
There is a “history of heroic architecture proposed for this site in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including several arches and a pair of 166-foot-tall columns,” Thomas E. Luebke, Trump-appointed Secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, wrote to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
The arch “would extend the symbolic landscape beyond the National Mall,” Luebke continued. “The city and its narrative of monuments is not static, and this project provides an opportunity for new national stories.”
What happens next
The bill has attracted 39 House cosponsors, all Democrats. It’s been referred to the House Natural Resources Committee. Odds of passage are low in the Republican-controlled chamber.
Possibly more likely: a successful lawsuit. In February, three Vietnam veterans and an architectural historian sued to block the planned arch, represented by the legal advocacy group Public Citizen.