Political Glance
A federal appeals court has paved the way for the Trump administration to replace the slavery exhibit it removed at the President’s House Site on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall.
Thursday’s decision effectively discards a February injunction ordering the National Park Service to restore the site, which included a series of illustrated panels about the nine people enslaved by George Washington at the executive mansion while he was president in the 1790s.
The panels were taken down, then partially restored, as part of a monthslong legal fight rooted in an executive order issued by President Donald Trump. Citing a 2006 agreement, the city sued the Park Service and the Interior Department in January after it abruptly removed the exhibit to comply with the order.
In its unanimous ruling, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals found that the city does not have any “statutory, property, or contractual rights that empower it to curate the exhibits in the President’s House.” The judges also concluded that the Trump administration’s replacement panels, which NPS has posted online, are “full of historical context.”
Imperial Germany famously signed a treaty under humiliating terms to end WWI at Versailles, codifying a surrender despite the fact that the war was overwhelmingly fought beyond its borders.
The Barack Obama presidential center opened in Chicago on Thursday after more than a decade in the making amid a musical fanfare and paeans to democratic principles that evoked a previous age, all while delivering an implied rebuke to Donald Trump.
The Justice Department is seeking to intervene in a federal lawsuit challenging a Chicago suburb’s housing reparations program for Black residents, arguing it is “racially discriminatory” and unconstitutional.
Portions of the sealant that was recently applied at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool as part of a series of renovations to the landmark appears to have begun peeling off the pool basin on June 18.
