A Ballroom on Trust: When Public Power Builds Private Grandeur

I learn that the highest court in this country has allowed construction of a new ballroom at the people’s chief executive residence to go forward, even as legal challenges continue, and without deciding whether demolishing an existing wing and raising this new edifice are lawful at all. I am further told that the cost is projected at some three hundred million dollars of public money, notwithstanding prior assurances that taxpayers would not be burdened. The court has, for the moment, spoken only to standing, not to substance. Yet power is being exercised, stone is being laid, and the relation between ruler and ruled is altered all the same.

When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right of making laws, with penalties, only for the public good, I meant to bind magistrates to a strict account. Power is not a private estate; it is held on trust, and the persons for whose good it is exercised are by nature free, equal, and independent. To demand their taxes, to remodel the common house in which their magistrate dwells, and to do so in the midst of unresolved controversy, is therefore no small thing. It must be such a measure as those same free and equal persons could reasonably consent to, were the case put plainly before them.

Here the court has taken a narrow path. It has not said the demolition and building are lawful, only that a particular association—the National Trust for Historic Preservation—has suffered no “concrete injury” and so may not sue. I do not pretend to mastery of your technical forms, but the principle is plain enough: there must be some known standing law, and some impartial judge, by which those who are truly injured may seek redress. If the circle of those deemed injured is drawn so tightly that no one can in practice call power to account, then discretion in effect becomes absolute, however modest the words in which it is cloaked.

I am struck that, with the very legality of the project unsettled, the work is nevertheless permitted to continue. This is what, in my time, I called prerogative: a liberty in the executive to act for the public good without, and even against, the letter of the law, where the law is silent, slow, or defective. Such prerogative I allowed, but only as power revocable, constantly answerable to the people’s evident benefit. To go on building while the law’s voice is yet uncertain may be defended as expedient; but if the edifice, once raised, serves chiefly the private magnificence of the office-holder, then this is not prerogative for the public, but the beginning of usurpation over them.

The matter of cost goes to the heart of property in the broad sense: lives, liberties, and estates. Three hundred million of any modern coin is no mean part of the people’s labour. To levy it upon them for defence, for the administration of equal justice, for the preservation of records and of necessary buildings—that lies well within the trust reposed in government. But to employ it, despite assurances to the contrary, upon a project whose public necessity is at best unclear, is to treat their estates as a reservoir for private designs. When rulers dispose of the community’s treasure upon such terms, they come near that condition I once described, where legislators “endeavour to take away, and destroy, the property of the people,” and so put themselves at odds with the end for which they were chosen.

I do not say, upon the scant facts before me, that this single ballroom amounts to such a revolt of rulers against their trust. Reason teaches us to distinguish a single doubtful act from a long train of abuses, all tending the same way, which alone would justify the people in withdrawing their obedience. Nor do I forget that courts must have rules by which to decide who may sue, lest every discontent rush to the bench. Yet I cannot but observe that when costs are high, assurances broken, legality unresolved, and avenues of challenge narrowed, the understanding of the people is apt to conclude that they are being governed, not as free partners to a common project, but as mere spectators while the great arrange their own conveniences.

The question, then, is not whether ballrooms are in themselves good or bad, fine or gaudy. It is whether this one is built in a manner that free and equal persons could own as theirs: openly justified, plainly necessary to some civil interest of the whole, paid for upon terms they were not misled to expect, and reversible if better judgment prevails. If it is so, it will stand as part of the people’s house. If it is not, then whatever splendour is hung within it, the foundation will rest on damaged trust—and that, in any commonwealth, is the most expensive ornament of all to replace.