Writing for The Blaze, Christopher Bedford reported on a major National Civic Art Society legislative victory that unfolded over May 20-21, 2024:
Word began to spread Monday evening around dinnertime: A House bill would be going to the floor Tuesday morning, designed to stop a returning Trump administration from reinstating his 11th-hour attempt to set architectural standards for federal buildings.
The bill was defeated at the last minute by a network of activists and sympathetic politicians . . . .
The author of the aborted bill, Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) is a longtime champion for the modern architects, who make a killing using taxpayer dollars to build ugly buildings taxpayers (and the poor people required to work in them) cannot stand. She’s been an enemy of any attempt to put reasonable, classical parameters around expensive civic architecture ever since a draft of President Trump’s end-of-term executive order, “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.”
Her latest attempt would have forced the next administration to compile a report on all the public comments before trying to reinstate standards of beauty again. The wording seemed innocuous enough, and leadership staff unfamiliar with her repeated attempts to thwart the Republican presidential nominee clearly didn’t notice it. If the bill had passed, it would have gummed up the systems, slowing and tying down any attempts to get reform past the well-organized modernist lobbies.
And it might have passed, too, if not for a retired senior House staffer who noticed the bill on the schedule. The retiree emailed National Civic Art Society President Justin Shubow, who quickly made a flurry of phone calls, along with texts and emails, working to activate the political network he’d helped build to formulate and push Trump’s original executive order (and subsequent legislative efforts) to make “federal buildings beautiful again.”
By 8:40 p.m., Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) was posting a rallying cry, and by the start of the next day, Republican members across the caucus had begun to track the bill.
By 10:30 a.m., the speaker’s office had pulled the vote.
The National Civic Art Society had won.