The legal fight over the Kennedy Center has become, in The Atlantic's phrase, "more than a little Wagnerian" — a dispute that keeps generating new hearings without ever approaching a resolution, and the reason is structural rather than merely litigious. [1] A federal judge can restrain the board's individual actions, again and again, as Thursday's hearing over the October 8 renaming delay illustrated. What no judge can do is remake the board itself. That power belongs to Congress alone, and any bill attempting it would need to survive a presidential veto from the same person who appointed the board he would be asked to help replace.

John Harrison, a University of Virginia law professor, described the Kennedy Center's governing structure as something of a "black box" from a court's perspective. [1] A judge can issue orders to the people who run an institution and enforce those orders when violated — which is exactly what Judge Christopher Cooper has done since May, when he found the board exceeded its authority in renaming the building and likely breached its fiduciary duty in voting to close it. [1] But a court "generally will not reach inside that structure to prescribe how its decisions should be made" when the underlying procedures are set by statute, Harrison said. [1] The board has demonstrated it can revote into a new violation faster than the courts can resolve the old one: after Cooper's May ruling struck down the December naming vote, the board reconvened this summer, approved closing the center again, and endorsed a revised plan to inscribe Trump's name in three separate locations — the vote that produced Thursday's hearing. [1]

Harrison laid out the two paths available to Congress: change the Kennedy Center's governance structure outright, or leave the board intact while rewriting what the board is legally permitted to do — for instance, by making the statutory language governing the building's name more explicit. [1] Either route "would have to be in a bill," he said. "It would have to be done by an act of Congress" — a body that has shown no appetite for taking up Kennedy Center legislation as a stand-alone measure, and where any provision would more plausibly need to ride inside a larger package. [1] None of that changes the basic asymmetry: Congress created the board's structure by statute in the first place, but changing it now requires the votes and the president's signature that made the current arrangement possible.

The scale of the board itself compounds the problem. Congress designed a 59-member body — 36 trustees appointed by the president for six-year terms, plus 23 ex officio members serving by virtue of government office, including the secretary of state and the mayor of Washington. [1] Historically, presidents filled vacancies only as trustees' terms expired, producing a body with some bipartisan mix by default. Trump broke that convention after returning to office, firing Biden-appointed trustees before their terms ended and becoming the first sitting president to chair the board himself. [1] Former Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser, who led the institution from 2001 to 2014, said the board is meant to govern, not manage — but the current arrangement has inverted that relationship. "It's a chicken-or-egg question," Kaiser said. "Are they doing more because there's no staff, or is there no staff because the board is doing more? There's no way a board of some 36 people can replace a staff of 700." [1]

That staff has shrunk to a skeleton crew under an executive team led by Matt Floca, whose background is in facilities management rather than arts administration. [1] The board itself has provided little evidence it functions as an oversight body in the traditional sense: a 2006 Government Accountability Office report found low trustee attendance and insufficient monitoring even under prior leadership, and one trustee told GAO investigators at the time that board membership was widely regarded as "honorific." [1] Kaiser offered a more generous read of that history, but the current board — which includes Maria Bartiromo, Sergio Gor, Laura Ingraham, Susie Wiles and Dan Scavino — has largely rubber-stamped proposals rather than exercised the independent judgment Kaiser described from his own tenure. [1]

The Atlantic's reporting also surfaced a quieter departure: Second Lady Usha Vance, appointed a trustee last year, stepped down in February without publicly citing a reason. Her spokesperson said only that she was "grateful to the President for her appointment" and plans to remain "a patron" of the center and its opera company. [1] Whether her exit reflected discomfort with the board's direction or simple scheduling is not something the record answers — but it is a data point in an institution whose governance decisions increasingly resist outside scrutiny of any kind.

Barring the unlikely event of a congressional breakthrough, The Atlantic's sourcing points to one honest answer for when this cycle actually ends: not with a ruling, but with the end of Trump's presidency in 2029. Every hearing between now and then, including Thursday's, restrains one action without touching the structure that keeps generating new ones.

-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin