Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman warned that the Supreme Court’s latest Trump ruling carries a “real tragedy” that outlasts the ballroom case.
In a Thursday piece for his Talking Feds Substack, Litman wrote about the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in the White House ballroom. The Monday decision cleared President Donald Trump to “proceed full steam ahead to construct his monstrous ballroom,” Litman wrote.
The decision lifted a lower-court block on the White House project, but the “per curiam, 5-4 order on the shadow docket expressly offered no opinion on the merits,” Litman blasted. He argued that the wording of the ruling has little to do with legal arguments about who could sue and who a construction pause would harm.
“That’s the real tragedy of the case, the point that eclipses standing doctrine and irreparable harm,” Litman wrote.
He pointed out that “every court to consider the ballroom’s legality has found it likely unlawful.” Four justices now say the same and “not one justice has written a word defending” the ballroom, Litman added.
The five in the majority said only that they “do not pass upon” the project’s legality, which Litman called “cold comfort” as the “unlawful project now resumes at deliberate breakneck speed.”
Litman framed the project itself as “in effect a raw power grab.” Congress “has expressly forbidden any building on federal park grounds” in Washington without its direct authorization, and none of the statutes that the Trump administration cited let the president “raze the East Wing and put up a private ballroom,” according to Litman.
He also cast the ballroom as Trump’s vanity and called it “a monument to himself, a swollen reflection of his hopelessly grandiose self-image.” The plan is “vastly unpopular with the American people, the actual owners of the ‘People’s House,’” he wrote.
“Only a consummate and abject failure of the entire government—a corrupt president, a pliable and quiescent Congress, and a cynical Supreme Court refusing to confront the real stakes of the case—could even make it possible,” Litman wrote. “But that’s precisely what is now staring us in the face.”
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