Interior begins digging arch its own historian says lacks congressional approval

…(cont) It was survived by the report that made the case for it. On Aug. 28, the National Park Service backed the arch in writing, and in the same writing conceded the structure would harm the sightlines of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials — a document that recommends its own wound and calls it approval.

None of this is new to Washington, which has buried due process before and always finds it a plot beside the last one. What is new is the timeline: excavation starts in two weeks, the lawsuit remains unresolved, and the authorization it awaits has not been granted by anyone with the power to grant it. The dirt does not wait for the paperwork. The dirt goes first.

Born of a want for a monument, the arch inherits its father's habit of skipping the line others stand in — the veterans, the historian, the court itself, all still waiting on an answer that construction has already decided not to need. That is not a controversial reading of events. It is the sequence, in order, as filed, and there is nothing else to call it.

There will be a groundbreaking. There will be, eventually, a ruling, and it will arrive to find the hole already dug — 250 feet of triumph standing on a permission slip nobody signed. A hole that deep has a way of making the question moot before the question is answered, which is, one suspects, the whole point of digging it now instead of later. That's not a planning failure. It's the plan.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you write your representative and ask them, plainly, whether they authorized any of this. If the answer is no, ask them what a law is for.