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…
Page B1From§Eachthe midnight edition — 1 September 2026
Supreme Court allows White House ballroom construction its own chief justice calls 'likely unlawful'.
As it ran on the front
SEPARATION OF POWERS, a founding principle of the American government, of Article I, Article II, and Article III extraction, died this week at the White House construction site, following complications from a Supreme Court order. It was old — older than the building being expanded around it — and had survived worse than this, or so it always figured.
Born in the summer of 1787, in a room where the windows were nailed shut so nobody outside could hear the arguing, the principle spent its life doing one job: keeping any single branch from getting too big for its office. It worked for the ballroom the way it worked for everything else, right up until the ballroom got built anyway.…
…(cont) The circumstances of death were, by any honest reading, unusual. A split order let construction proceed. The Chief Justice — its own Chief Justice, in the dissent — called the underlying action 'likely unlawful' and wrote plainly that the outcome was 'no victory for separation of powers.' That's not this reporter's phrase, whippersnapper, that's the man who runs the building writing the eulogy himself before the concrete had even set. When your own institution tells you the win wasn't a win, that's not a technicality. That's a body.
It is survived by the words 'likely unlawful,' which remain in the official record, doing no work, changing nothing, decorating the dissent like a plaque nobody reads. It is preceded in death by a long line of norms that also went quietly, the ones about asking first and checking twice. This one just happened to have better legal representation than most and lost anyway.
There will be no ceremony. There rarely is, for these. The building goes up regardless, on schedule, brick by brick, while the argument about whether it should have gone up at all gets filed under dissent and forgotten by the next news cycle. That's not malarkey, that's just how this shit gets built now — quietly, on a Tuesday, while everyone's watching something else.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you read the dissent. All of it. Not the part that lost, the part that told you why it should have.
“They didn't say it was legal, they said build it anyway and we'll sort out legal later — that's not a ruling, that's a permission slip with an asterisk. When the guy who runs the court says his own court's order isn't a win for separating power, you write that down. That's the whole game: get the thing built before anyone can stop it.”
“The Court simply declined to block construction pending further review — that's not an endorsement, that's judicial restraint. Sure, the Chief Justice used the word 'unlawful,' but he also said 'likely,' which — actually, that's not better, is it. Construction proceeds because nobody stopped it, not because anybody said it was fine.”
The receipts
Lower-court rulings would have blocked construction of the 90,000-square-foot ballroom after finding that the Trump administration should have first sought approval from Congress.
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…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.