It’s Just Too Late for John Roberts to Say He Doesn’t Like Trump’s Ballroom

Trump's White House helipad and ballroom under construction in July.Andrew Leyden/Zuma Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. On Monday, the same Supreme Court justices who helped Donald Trump return to the White House, gave him criminal immunity, and greenlit dozens of his illegal actions, gave the president yet another gift: a massive ballroom. Though it seems clear that the destruction of the East Wing and its replacement with a 90,000-square foot ballroom atop a new military bunker is illegal, the court’s Republican appointees have cleared the way for its completion. All, that is, but one. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Democratic nominated-judges in dissent. Writing for the dissenters, Roberts called the construction “likely unlawful” and a trampling of Congressional authority. Given the unpopularity of the project, perhaps Roberts thought it best to keep his name off of it. But while Roberts clearly doesn’t want to be blamed for the ballroom, he wrote many of the precedents that undergird the majority’s decision to let it go forward. Though Roberts had the sense to dissent, in similar cases he has been on the other side. Monday’s emergency docket order again giving Trump the go-ahead halts a district court order that could have stopped above-ground work while allowing construction to precede on a secure, below-ground facility. Instead, the Supreme Court order allows all construction to continue until the litigation is complete. Because a final ruling on the merits of the case by the Supreme Court is probably months if not years away, Monday’s decision will likely allow the project to reach completion. The majority’s argument—and Roberts’ dissent—focus on the issue of standing, the technical question of whether the plaintiffs challenging the ballroom have the right to do so in federal court. Standing generally turns on whether the plaintiff is injured by the policy they are challenging. In this case, the plaintiffs are the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States and one of its members, Alison K. Hoagland, an architectural historian who passes by the White House frequently and claims a personal and professional interest in not seeing the former East Wing replaced with Trump’s new ballroom. Hoagland claimed she had the same basis to sue that the Supreme Court has afforded to people in environmental cases who allege an injury if, for example, the government kills off a species so that they no longer have the pleasure of viewing it. But in Monday’s unsigned order, five GOP appointees found that isn’t enough to obtain standing. In his dissent, Roberts disagreed, defending the idea that Hoagland and the trust had asserted a viable claim, just as an environmentalist could challenge the pollution of a river that would kill off the fish she liked to watch. As Roberts put it, after Monday, “I want to look at a crocodile” is enough to get standing but “I want to look at the White House” is not. The Republican appointees have been manipulating standing doctrine in recent years in order to achieve desired results. But even if they felt strongly that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing, the request for a stay required the justices to determine which side would face greater, even irreparable, harm if the project proceeded at this juncture. Clearly, the preservationists would suffer great harm if the ballroom is completed. Conversely, the president wouldn’t be harmed by a pause. After all, his purported national security concerns are already being met with construction of his underground lair continuing. Moreover, the president cannot be harmed if his action is illegal in the first place. This is a point Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson separately made just last week when her Republican-appointed colleagues allowed Trump’s illegal executive order on mail-in ballots to take effect. “The President is only conceivably harmed by an injunction barring executive action if that court order is preventing him from doing something the law permits him to do,” Jackson wrote. In Monday’s decision in the ballroom case, the majority wouldn’t discuss the legality of the project. That’s probably because the ballroom is pretty clearly illegal. It’s a privately funded demolition and reconstruction of the so-called People’s House when Congress explicitly gave itself control over such new buildings and their funding. As Roberts wrote in his dissent: “Congress has explicitly prohibited the construction of any ‘building or structure. . . on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.’” Moreover, by using private funds, the Trump administration is circumventing Congress’ power of the purse; Congress is supposed to allot taxpayers’ money for White House renovation. “Today’s decision,” Roberts wrote, “is no victory for the separation of powers.” Though Roberts had the legal and political sense to dissent this time, in similar cases he has generally been on the other side. Time and again, this court has reasoned that the executive is harmed if his obviously lawless actions are put on hold by the courts. When Trump kicked off his second term in January 2025 with a flurry of illegal activity that the lower courts quickly blocked, the Supreme Court repeatedly came to his rescue on the theory that the president is harmed if his actions cannot take effect—even ones that are clearly illegal, such as denying citizenship to people born in the United States, which the GOP appointees said courts could not block in full. In case after case, the majority presumed that the harm to Trump is greater than the harm to the targets of his actions—even when those are far more irreparable and concrete. There is an irony in Roberts’ unwillingness to go along with this view of executive prerogative in the ballroom case, because he is largely responsible for it. In decision after decision, Roberts has imbued the presidency with the powers of the so-called unitary executive, a king-like ruler with total control over the executive branch. The apotheosis of this theory is Roberts’ majority opinion in Trump v. United States, which gave presidents criminal immunity. The chief justice explicitly placed a president’s desires above the constraints of the criminal laws passed by Congress. It was better, he wrote in that decision, to have an “energetic, vigorous, decisive” executive than one who was bound by the criminal laws, which he described as “counterproductive burdens” on the “‘vigor'” and “‘energy’ of the Executive.” The country, he promised, would be better off with a decisive leader, rather than one who must “‘answer for his conduct’ in court.” Just one year later, Trump decisively but illegally razed the East Wing and started building a giant ballroom. Roberts ended his dissent from Monday with a quote. “Winston Churchill once remarked that ‘[w]e shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us,’” Roberts wrote. “All the more reason to ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.” Roberts’ warning, it seems, is that an administration working out of an illegally-constructed building might be shaped by that ethos of lawlessness, and that, within its ill-gotten walls, they might be inspired to flout the law in other pursuits. That may be true, but it’s remarkably unselfaware coming from Roberts. The man who told presidents they could crime with impunity is now fretting that they might, actually, ignore the law. Churchill’s admonition could be redirected at the chief justice and his colleagues: The Supreme Court writes opinions, and those opinions shape the country. All the more reason to enforce the law, especially when it comes to the inhabitant of the People’s House. But on Monday, the court once again told Trump to go ahead with an illegal scheme. The lesson is clear.