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Strictly Ballroom: Justice Kavanaugh Defeats Chief Justice Roberts

The Court rejects the D.C. Circuit's erroneous "aesthetic injury" standing precedents and the Chief can only wax about Churchill.

Josh Blackman | 8.31.2026 5:51 PM

I often write that my favorite writings by Chief Justice Roberts are when he's in dissent. These are the rare instances when I think he actually believes what he is writing. But the opposite seems true in National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States. The Court, by a 5-4 vote, stayed the injunction, thus allowing construction of the East Wing ballroom/military complex. The majority opinion was per curiam, though as I'll explain below, it is almost certainly a Kavanaugh production. Chief Justice Roberts was in dissent, joined by the Court's three liberals. Based on my quick search, this lineup appeared only one other time in NIH v. APHA.

At this point, John Roberts is utterly unrecognizable. This was the person that George W. Bush nominated to the Supreme Court because of his robust understanding of presidential power in the national security context, yet Roberts dismissed the government's national security concerns in a perfunctory........

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