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On Monday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to keep building its new White House ballroom, even as four justices concluded that the project itself is likely unlawful.

The lineup was striking. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in dissent. Roberts wrote for the group and accused the majority of allowing a likely infringement of Congress’ constitutional authority to continue because it had drawn the rules governing who may sue in federal court too narrowly.

The dispute arises from one of President Donald Trump’s more characteristically grand building projects, a new White House ballroom that has become part of his broader effort to leave a physical imprint on Washington. Trump has taken a personal interest in the project, which the White House has promoted as a long-needed addition to a building that lacks sufficient space for large official and ceremonial functions. The administration demolished the old East Wing last year and began replacing it with a new structure that includes an underground military installation and an aboveground ballroom.

The project, now estimated to cost roughly $400 million, is supposedly being financed through private donations rather than a congressional appropriation. Private donors can pick up the tab. They cannot necessarily take Congress out of the equation. Federal law requires express congressional authority to erect a building or structure on federal parks and public grounds in Washington. The ballroom is being built on President’s Park, and Congress never expressly approved it.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation sued to challenge the project. In March, a federal district judge granted the trust a preliminary injunction, temporarily restricting the ballroom construction from proceeding while the litigation continued. The function of that relief is unusually tangible here. The challenged conduct is the construction itself, and every additional stage of building changes the facts on the ground while the courts decide whether the project was lawfully authorized in the first place. A ruling months later that the government lacked authority to build the ballroom would come in a very different posture if hundreds of millions of dollars had already........

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