This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Last fall, President Donald Trump demolished the East Wing of the White House so that he could build a gigantic honking ballroom in its place, using a conspicuously fuzzy combination of private donations and hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds that lawmakers very much did not appropriate for that purpose. Federal law prohibits the construction of any new buildings on federal property in Washington, D.C., without the “express authority” of Congress, which, in news I am sure will astonish you, Trump did not bother obtaining first. 

In an unsigned 5-4 opinion published on Monday, though, the Supreme Court decided that a president’s unilateral decision to bulldoze part of the White House was totally fine. The justices in the majority strained to avoid saying as much; in the final paragraph of their opinion, they expressly stated that it does not “pass upon the legality of the government’s East Wing project.” 

But the upshot of National Park Service v. National Trust for Historic Preservation is that whether or not Trump’s already-in-progress ballroom is “legal”—something that, in my view, the Supreme Court of the United States really ought to weigh, but whatever—no one has the power to stop its construction, even temporarily. As a result, if a federal court eventually rules on the merits that, no, Trump can’t build the ballroom, that conclusion will be academic. The ballroom will already be complete, and Getty Images will be awash in photos of Justice Clarence Thomas attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony, cocktail in hand, having an........

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