Supreme Court allows White House ballroom construction its own chief justice calls 'likely unlawful,' 5 to 4.

…(cont) That Monday, the Supreme Court allowed construction to continue on the White House ballroom while the underlying lawsuit is still being fought out in the lower courts. That same Monday, in the same case, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the three liberal justices against his own five colleagues and wrote, in his own dissent, that the majority's reasoning was "likely unlawful." He didn't stop there. He wrote that the outcome was "no victory for separation of powers." He wrote that the majority's reasoning likely runs into Congress's power of the purse — the part where somebody in this country is supposed to be the one who says yes to spending the money, and it isn't supposed to be five votes on a Tuesday docket.

Five days after that, on September 5th, the New York Times ran an opinion with the headline "Not So Supreme, Mr. Roberts."

I keep reading that Monday over twice, out of order and then back in order, and it comes out the same both times, which is the part I don't love.

My car's needed a fan belt for a while now — you know how that goes, you keep meaning to get to it. Took it to the garage last month. The guy at the counter wrote, right there in the box on the ticket where they put their notes, "likely not safe to drive." Then he handed me the keys and told me to have a good weekend. It started. I drove it home. It's sitting in the driveway right now, running, best I can tell, with that ticket folded up in the glovebox where I put it so I wouldn't lose it.

Is that what "likely" is supposed to do — sit in somebody's own handwriting, on that person's own paperwork, and then get driven right past by the same hand that wrote it?

Does a warning written into the record stop being a warning once the people it warns about outnumber the person who wrote it, five to four?

If the head of a court writes down, in the case itself, that what the court is about to allow is probably against the law, and the court allows it anyway, whose name is supposed to carry more weight in that building — his, on the order that let the trucks back in, or his, on the page that said don't?

I don't have an answer for that one. I don't think the ticket in my glovebox does either.

Oh — before I let this go. I almost skipped the part about Congress, because I'd already spent all my attention on the first line of his dissent, and I had to go back through it twice before the second part caught up with me. But it's right there: the chief justice didn't stop at saying the ruling was probably against the law. He went on to say it probably steps on Congress's power to decide how the government's money gets spent — which is a different way of saying somebody started building a ballroom before anybody with the actual authority to pay for it signed off.

That's the part I keep coming back to, more than the rest of it, if I'm honest — not the ballroom, not even the five and the four, just the date underneath all of it. Because I go back to my notes and it's still sitting there, same as the first time I read it: the chief justice of the United States, writing in his own dissent, that what his own court had just allowed was likely unlawful, on August 31st, 2026.