VOTE is the Message on this Colorfl Sign by Mainer Lynn Beasley at the August 15, 2026, Protest Against Collins-Trump in Monument Square, Portland.

Congesswoman Chellie Pingree (D-ME). Ranking Member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior Environment and Related Agencies, is calling on Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) to file a lawsuit on behalf of Congress to block construction of President Trump’s 250-foot arch.  Pingree’s letter comes after the Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burum announced they’d be breaking ground at Memorial Circle – which site directly in the sigtline between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memoriall – within two weeks, ignoring a pending lawsuit and bypassing Congressional authorization.  Pingree artues that Congress has neither appropriated funding nor granted authority for this project under the Commerative Works Act.

“Congress is the institution whose appropriations power and Commemorative Works Act authority this Adminisration is bypassing ouright.  That is a concrete, particularized injury, traceable directly to the Administration’s own conduct and redresssable by a court order halting construction,” Pingree said.  “If the Administration wants to hide behind a standing argument, let it make that case against the body whose lawsl it is violating”

Three Vietman War veterans have sued the Trump Administration over the proposed arch, arguing that the arch would ” dishonor their military and foreign service.”

“Americans are watching this Whie House pour concrete over the rules of their own government, and they are furious”, Pingree continued.  “That fury runs deepest among veterans and Gold STar famiies.  Gold Star families who walk through Arligton’s gates to visit their loves ones would  have to do it in the shadow of a 250-foot tribute to a man who, when asked who the monument was for, reportedly answered, “Me.”

On Friday, Trump’s DOJ filed a notice of supplemental authority in the veterans’ lawsuit, Lemmon v. Trump. citing the Supreme Court’s August 13 decision concernng the White House ballroom in support of its standing arguments in the pending arch litigation.  Pingree, however, argues that Chief Justice Roberts’ dissenting argument stating that the ballroom construction was “likely unlawful” and emphasizing that the Court was allowing construction to proceed on standing grounds, not because the construction was legal, expressly putting the ball in Congres’s court to act.