Construction on Donald Trump’s aloof, monarchical, for-rich-whites-only 90,000-square-foot ballroom can proceed, thanks to an aloof, monarchical, and for-rich-whites-only Supreme Court.
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What the Supreme Court handed down today isn’t a ruling about a simple, easy-to-explain throwback to the Gilded Age. It’s a ruling about whether anything and anyone can stop Donald Trump from doing whatever he wants to the country’s most symbolic public property. And by extension, to the country itself.
I predicted this. Not because I’m some legal genius, but because these robed robbers and rulers on the High Court are now just too predictable. When given a chance to check or stop Trump, they will, 99% of the time – my own educated guess – find a reason not to.
Further, give Congress a chance to defend our Constitution, and it too will find a reason to look away. Now put these accomplices and capitulars together, and you get exactly what happened today, a 5-4 ruling clearing the way for construction to continue (It never really stopped.) on the White House ballroom, because the justices decided Trump has the authority to bulldoze part of the people’s house, or frankly all of it, because Congress, which has authority over the property, doesn’t give a damn.
That’s the pathetic and easy-way-out center of this ruling. The majority didn’t say the ballroom is legal. It said the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacks standing to challenge it, because the “power of the purse” and authority over federal property belong to Congress, and Congress hasn’t sued.
The only people with the power to stop this are Speaker Mike Johnson and his gutless House majority. Since they won’t sue, Trump can do whatever the hell he wants. So fitting for this alarming era of congressional cowardice.
The Court knows damn well that Congress won’t act, and it is choosing to hide behind that inaction rather than exercise the desperately needed judicial check the Constitution actually gives it.
Chief Justice Roberts had the foresight to see what this really was. Joining the Court’s three liberals in dissent, he called the construction “likely unlawful” and warned that the majority was letting the executive branch “arrogate Congress’s exclusive powers” simply because lawmakers haven’t bothered to defend them.
He picked apart the White House’s claim that $400 million in private donations gives them the right to bypass Congress, pointing out that federal law requires the “express authority of Congress” for major construction on federal land in Washington, regardless of who is paying.
And he said by letting Trump “outrun the courts,” finishing the building long before any court reaches a final verdict on its legality, the majority has made the legal question academic.
In other words, you can’t unbuild a ballroom.
So, will anything actually restrain Trump? If he can demolish part of the White House because Congress didn’t formally object, what’s left standing that Congress also hasn’t formally objected to?
He’s already ripped out the Rose Garden. He’s already put in a helipad, ripping up the beautifully manicured South Lawn. Under SCOTUS logic, there’s no legal reason he couldn’t decide the Oval Office is too small (I’ve stood in it, and it is small) and knock out a wall, or demolish the whole West Wing like he did the East Wing.
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Why wouldn’t he? Trump yearns for massive official offices like those of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un. And Trump, who thinks he’s some supreme builder, realizes that the monster Ballroom on the East side dwarfs the puny disc on the West side. Well, he’ll want to even that out.
The Oval Office is not simply another room in a government building. The first Oval Office was built in 1909, when President William Howard Taft, with congressional approval, expanded the West Wing, and the office was moved to its current location in 1934 during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s expansion of the West Wing, again, with congressional approval.
Every president since then has used that room. It has been the setting for decisions and announcements that defined generations: war and peace, crises and triumphs, statehood and national tragedy. In 1945, Harry Truman announced Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II from the Oval Office. It has become so synonymous with the presidency that the room itself has come to symbolize the peaceful transfer and exercise of presidential power.
But Trump has already destroyed the Oval, plastering gold appliques everywhere there was once white space.
Further, there’s no reason he couldn’t take a dislike to the Lincoln Memorial and rip the statue of Abe out from his chair, and put a gold-plated Donald Trump in its place.
Two years ago, if someone told you Trump would take a wrecking ball to the East Wing, you would have laughed. So, don’t laugh when you consider that the increasingly unstable Trump would tear up more of the People’s House, or brazenly try to erase Lincoln.
This ruling now gives Trump almost dictator-like authority. The Court gave Trump broad immunity from prosecution. The Court is letting his administration meddle with the Postal Service and voter rolls ahead of an election without consequence.
Now add a Court that will let him gut and rebuild the people’s house because the people’s representatives couldn’t be bothered to stand up for the people’s house. Individually, each ruling is a hammer. Together, they are a bulldozer, operating with impunity to knock over any democratic limits standing in the way.
The ballroom will get built. I mean, we all knew it was always going to get built. But what’s next? What will we watch be torn down?
The destruction of the White House and its grounds is a metaphor for our democracy. It’s been torn apart, it’s been ignored, it’s been run over. And now that it’s just a leveled construction pit, what will take its place?
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