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…
Page B1From§Eachthe milkman edition — 1 September 2026
Chief justice warns ballroom ruling is 'no victory for separation of powers'; Court allows it anyway.
As it ran on the front
Separation of Powers, a load-bearing idea in American government, has died in Washington. It was old enough that nobody could give an exact birthdate, though most put it around 1787, and it is survived by three branches that no longer call each other back.
The immediate cause was a construction permit. The Supreme Court allowed White House ballroom construction to continue, and a second wire confirmed the same ruling within the hour, as if the news needed saying twice to be believed. The Chief Justice dissented, on the record, calling the outcome 'no victory for separation of powers' — a line that reads less like a legal opinion than a man watching a load-bearing wall come down and noting, politely, that it was load-bearing.…
…(cont) Separation of Powers is survived by the checks, who are fine, the balances, who are managing, and the ballroom, which will have excellent acoustics. It is preceded in death by the norm against building things nobody asked for while other things go unbuilt, and by the practice of taking a dissent as a warning rather than a formality.
This paper has covered a great many things dying in this town — programs, streaks, the occasional carve-out — and there is a familiar shit-eating quality to a ruling that lets one party win and calls it a technicality. The vote was not close in the sense that mattered. It was 'allowed,' the papers said, as if permission had been the only question, when the question the dissent actually asked was who gets asked at all.
No funeral is planned. The construction crews are already on-site, which is its own kind of eulogy, and this whippersnapper of a controversy will likely be forgotten by the time the drywall goes up and somebody hangs the first painting.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that you read the dissent.
“They pour resources into a construction project nobody asked for while every other appropriations fight gets called unaffordable, and the Chief Justice himself says out loud that the process broke on the way there. That's not a checks-and-balances story, that's a receipt with the Court's own name on it. When the guy at the top of the third branch tells you the game's rigged and the ruling still goes through, believe him.”
“This was a construction permitting matter, plain and simple, and the ruling reflects settled precedent on executive facilities — the dissent is a single justice's opinion, not a verdict on the republic. Look, 'no victory for separation of powers' is strong language for a permit dispute, and if I'm being honest that phrase doesn't come from nowhere. It's fine. The building will be 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.
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.