A panel of Trump appointees approved his 250-foot arch for drones and snipers with no appropriation behind it, and a federal judge halted work before midnight.

…(cont) Then the drawing grew a purpose. On September 20th the president said the arch would now double as a military complex, built to house drones and snipers. The next day, Monday the 21st, Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho, a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, said he opposed paying for the project out of the defense budget, and that other military needs should come first — a Republican appropriator, on the record, saying the money his own committee hands the Pentagon has better places to be.

That Wednesday the rivalry declined to show up. Asked about the president's claim that the new arch would blow the Paris monument away "in every way," President Emmanuel Macron said, "Monuments are bigger than ourselves."

The review itself went the Thursday before September 28. Travis Voyles, the Trump-appointed vice chairman of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, sent civil society and preservation groups a letter informing them the federal review was over, because addressing their concerns and those of the general public would require deviating from the president's vision for the project. One preservation group said it was "gobsmacked." That letter is the death certificate, and it is unusually honest for one: the consultation was not closed because it found nothing. It was closed because of what it would have required. A review is a nuisance by design. It is the shit that gets in the way of a man in a hurry, and that is the whole of its job description.

So Friday arrived with the outcome already assembled. A panel stacked with the president's own appointees voted yes, and before midnight the same day a federal judge blocked all work on it. Three lawsuits stand between the drawings and the ground. No appropriation for a triumphal arch has ever cleared Congress; the ledger line simply does not exist.

A review runs on facts both sides concede, which is the other thing that got retired this autumn. In a September 2nd piece, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was quoted as having once said data centers "suck water" — plainly, in quotation marks, as a man states a condition. The same file has him calling the water question propaganda, which is a longer way of saying hogwash. A procedure cannot survive in a government where last year's sentence can be reclassified as somebody else's lie.

Independent federal design review is survived by the panel that voted to approve, by the two defense secretaries attached to the project, by three lawsuits, and by one federal judge, who did late on a Friday night what a commission is supposed to do at a Thursday meeting. It is preceded in death by the budget line that was never written, and by the consultation that was closed in September rather than answered.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you look for the appropriation that pays for this arch, and, when you cannot find it, ask the member of Congress whose name is on your ballot how the drawings got this close to the ground without one.