The Supreme Court divided 5-4 in allowing construction of the new White House ballroom to continue.
Page B1From§Eachthe supper edition — 31 August 2026
Supreme Court allows Trump's ballroom construction that its own Chief Justice calls 'likely unlawful'.
As it ran on the front
SEPARATION OF POWERS, a principle of long standing in the American constitutional order, died this week at a five-to-four order permitting construction to continue on a White House ballroom, a project its own Chief Justice, in dissent, called 'likely unlawful.' It was 239 years old.
Born in 1787 out of a hot room in Philadelphia and a shared distrust of kings, Separation of Powers spent two and a half centuries doing the unglamorous work of making sure no one branch built whatever it wanted just because it could. It was not flashy. It rarely made the papers on a good day. It mostly just sat there, a fact everyone agreed to, the way you agree gravity is real.…
…(cont) It is survived by the dissent itself, several pages of a Chief Justice's own words, filed and printed and now functionally decorative; by the Court's majority, which allowed the construction to proceed anyway; and by the ballroom, which will be built regardless of what the man who runs the building it's attached to thinks the law says.
It was preceded in death by the norm against a President building on federal grounds while the legality of the building is still being argued in the building's own house — a norm nobody wrote down because nobody thought they had to.
Old-timers at this paper remember when a Chief Justice's dissent was a warning shot, not a keepsake. This one is bunk with a marble facade on it, and there's no polite way to say that a court can call a thing 'likely unlawful' and let the excavators start anyway; that's just what happened, and it is a bit of a shit sandwich for anyone who still thought the sentence 'we said no' meant no.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that the next dissent be read into the record before the excavators start, not after.
“Read that back slow: the Court's own chief says the thing is probably against the law, and the concrete gets poured anyway because the vote came out five to four. That's not a legal opinion holding, that's a legal opinion getting outvoted by the calendar.”
The receipts
Chief Justice John Roberts broke with his conservative colleagues in a Supreme Court decision Monday that allowed construction on the proposed White House ballroom to continue, saying the ruling upsets the separation of powers. Roberts…
US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts recently let construction on President Donald Trump's White House ballroom continue in a temporary solo decision, but on Monday he sided with the three liberals against the five right-wingers who…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.