Hains Point

I grew up playing to the park where I bike ride almost weekly.

Haines Point, also known as East Potomac Park, is a local treasure of D.C. It's a manmade island.

It's a bit more than 100 years old.

And Congress set it aside for the recreation of the public a century ago.

I grew up playing to the park where I bike ride almost weekly.

Haines Point, also known as East Potomac Park, is a local treasure of D.C. It's a manmade island.

it's a bit more than 100 years old and congress set it aside for the recreation of the public a century ago and man has it done the job it is a place of recreation so you just go down there there's a there's a road which is mostly closed which is used as a the best cycling loop in the city also people are out strolling on it there's great grounds to picnic you always if you're out there on a weekend there are people picnicking it is a best spot for fishing because the potomac river and then this little channel washington harbor channel are flank it and that people are out there fishing.

There's a kid's playground.

Yeah.

I- they didn't act with any alacrity when, um, bas- you know, they found out trees were being torn down on a Friday, and they were already cut down on Haines Point in East Potomac Park by the time they had the hearing on Monday.

Yeah.

If, if you send ICE agents to a, a heavily immigrant, uh, precinct-

... all my old buddies and I would go over there during lunch hours sometimes and hit balls, but it was right there on the Tidal Basin.

It's really called Haines Point.

Uh, they-

Do you mean where Fanny Fox-

Mm-hmm

... and the renovation of that, uh, what we now are going to refer to as the Jim Cardle Public Golf Course.

Haines Point, yes.

Uh, enthusiasts fear that will make it unaffordable.

Well, Donald Trump is attacking the federal judge who's hearing ongoing legal challenges to a golf course that the president is rushing to renovate before anyone can stop him.

It's on a peninsula here in Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River called Haines Point.

The golf course on Haines Point has been around For decades, it's historic.

Donald Trump has been saying for a couple of years that he wants to overhaul that golf course.

He never saw a golf course he didn't want to overhaul, I suppose.

The government's central argument here? is that it is restoring the course's original 1920s look.

I mean, that's an argument, right? The plaintiffs have argued, though, that as has been true in the litigation over the East Wing of the White House, which, by the way, most of the remains of the East Wing of the White House are in fact buried at Haynes Point and East Potomac Park.

They just dumped all the debris there and covered it over in dirt and made like artificial hillocks out of them.

And who knows what sort of garbage, you know, asbestos, who knows what else in that? They just went and did it.

This strikes me as such a case, perhaps tellingly, None of the folks on right-wing social media who have echoed the government's complaints about Reyes' behavior in this case have even attempted to acknowledge the full contours of the government's conduct, let alone to defend it.

Ultimately, the problem this imbroglio illustrates isn't that the administration loses in the district courts, it's that it increasingly seems to treat district courts less as co-equal actors whose role it must respect and then has obstacles to be outrun and then delegitimized when they catch up.

If that's how the government behaves in a dispute over a few hundred trees on Haynes Point, it's worth asking how it behaves when the stakes are actually high and whether the appellate courts, including the Supreme Court, should keep that behavior in mind when the government asks them to review what the district courts have done.

All right.