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.
Page B1From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 1 September 2026
Supreme Court allows ballroom construction; chief justice dissents citing threat to separation of powers.
As it ran on the front
OBITUARY
Separation of Powers, as it pertained to the question of who gets to build things at the White House, died this week at an institutional age nobody bothered to count. Cause of death: a five-vote majority.…
…(cont) It was born, near as anyone can tell, sometime around 1787, the offspring of a document that didn't trust any one branch to get too comfortable. It grew up slow and boring, mostly doing its job in footnotes, the kind of relative you only heard from when something went wrong. It was, by all accounts, still working as recently as this week — well enough, anyway, to produce a dissent.
It is survived by the dissent itself, filed by the chief justice, who wrote that the majority's decision was 'no victory for separation of powers' — which is the kind of sentence a fellow writes when he already knows how the funeral's going to go and is getting the eulogy in early.
It is preceded in death by a number of norms this reporter has already written up this year, none of which this newspaper has space to relitigate, whippersnapper though the ballroom project may be in the long run of these things.
The Court's majority allowed the construction to continue. That's the whole ruling, stated plain: a building project proceeds, over an objection that the building project is not, strictly, the kind of thing branches of government are supposed to just wave through for each other. Nobody on the losing side used the word 'shit,' which this reporter respects, because it would not have improved the sentence, but this reporter will use it once, here, flat: it is a shame, a plain shit shame, when the only vote against a thing is also the only vote that noticed what the thing actually was.
The construction continues on schedule. The dissent sits in the federal reporter, available to anyone who wants to read what a dying institution sounds like on the way out — measured, a little formal, not shouting.
In lieu of flowers, read the dissent. It's a few pages. It won't take you as long as the ballroom will.
“They dressed it up as separation of powers, but strip the marble panels: five justices let the ballroom get built and the chief justice's dissent is the only receipt we've got that anybody up there noticed the trick. Every 'no' on this court arrives on its knees, and every 'yes' gets poured concrete before the ink's dry — remember that next time somebody says the courts still check the executive.”
“The Court allowed construction to continue, that's it, that's the story — dissents happen, that's what a healthy court looks like, checks and balances working exactly as — actually, 'checks and balances working' might be doing some lifting there, let me circle back.”
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…
Also, a principal helped save 900 children in Nepal. Here’s the latest at the end of Monday.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.