Unfit to Print: ARTY FOUL
Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond has a mega scoop!
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ARTY FOUL
Washington Post reporter Dan Diamond has a mega scoop!
President Donald Trump has fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts, which was expected to review construction plans for the new White House ballroom and triumphal arch.
Diamond’s report claims the commission is an “independent” agency and “traditionally includes a mix of architects and urban planners.”
Democrats are sounding off on the move, with Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree declaring, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“He has now fired the gatekeepers … We gotta fight back. This is the People’s House!” Pingree exclaimed.
It only takes getting to the third paragraph of the report, though, to realize the framing of this story does not reflect reality.
“President Joe Biden appointed the six sitting commissioners to four-year terms, several of which would have extended through 2028,” Diamond writes.
Huh. If this is an “independent” agency, how is it that Biden got to staff the entire thing?
Oh, right. Read on down to the 14th paragraph — the second-to-last in the article — and we learn that this move wasn’t unprecedented at all.
Biden fired Trump’s first-term appointees to the commission under the auspices of increasing diversity. In short, they let you do it if the people you’re firing are white:
“Biden in 2021 fired Trump appointees from the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission, with Biden administration officials at the time defending the moves as an effort to diversify the panels. It was the first time in the commissions’ history that a president had forced out sitting members, drawing some criticism from art and architecture experts that Biden was politicizing its work.”
According to reporting at the time, D.C. officials actually pushed Biden to fire EVEN MORE of Trump’s appointees. Deputy Mayor John Falcicchio wrote in a letter to Biden that Trump’s appointees were standing in the way of the district’s progress “toward racial and economic equity, climate change and affordable housing.”
Falcicchio complained that the Commission of Fine Arts consisted entirely of “white, male Trump appointees” who supported returning federal architecture to neoclassical design and away from ugly brutalism á la the FBI headquarters.
The firings and forced resignations included CFA’s Jewish chairman Justin Shubow, an architectural critic who is president of the National Civic Art Society; Perry Guillot, a landscape architect whose work was featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Architectural Digest and who received an architectural award from the Institute for Classical Art and Architecture; Chas Fagan, an artist and sculptor who painted 45 presidential portraits on commission from C-SPAN and the White House Historical Association; Steven Spandle, an architect with extensive experience in historic preservation; and Rodney Mims Cook Jr., founder and president of the National Monuments Foundation.
Biden left just two of Trump’s appointees on the board until the end of their terms in 2024, including architect James McCrery — an associate professor at the Catholic University of America’s School of Architecture and Planning — who is overseeing Trump’s ballroom project.
Shubow warned that Biden’s actions would set a bad precedent.
“By terminating a fifth member of the Fine Arts Commission, Biden has proven that he is treating commissioners, who are statutorily intended to act independently of the president, as mere political appointees to be removed at will. By violating the law and precedent going back over 100 years, Biden has opened the floodgates. I would not be surprised if future administrations replace all commissioners as soon as they come into office,” Shubow said in 2022.
If anything, then, Trump was exceptionally kind by waiting ten months to oust the Biden appointees.
It’s also worth noting here that the CFA’s former commissioner, architect Billie Tsien, left of her own accord at the beginning of Trump’s term. Tsien is helping construct the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. If you want to look at how that’s going, you can see for yourself here.
Beautiful, innit?
Biden’s other appointees included someone involved in the construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture (ugly), a professor with a specialty in urban central planning, a “transdisciplinary designer and urbanist,” a “sustainability” architect, and an architect who turned an IKEA into a “boutique hotel” (ugly).
Good riddance.
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