TRUMP’S BALLROOM IS A MONUMENT TO THE FAILURE OF CONGRESS AND THE SUPREME COURT TO DO THEIR JOBS.
By Scheerpost-Austin Sarat - October 27, 2026
Sometimes a ballroom is more than a ballroom. In President Trump’s case, it is much more than a builder’s dream. It is a material expression of his willingness to flout the law and disregard the Constitution. It is what authoritarianism looks like when displayed in concrete and marble.
Polls show that Americans do not share Trump’s ballroom obsession. They see the ballroom as an extravagant distraction from this country’s real problems.
Over the weekend, protesters at Trump rallies registered their feelings when they shouted: “Shove that ballroom up your a**!” But Trump is undaunted.
Just last week, the White House released a video of the ballroom construction, taken from the president’s helicopter.
We wouldn’t be having to witness the ballroom spectacle if Congress and the Supreme Court had done their jobs.
For example, at the end of August, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had stopped most of the ballroom’s construction. The litigation had been filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which claimed that the president’s action in tearing down the White House’s East Wing and constructing a ballroom to replace it was illegal.
The Court did not address that issue. Instead, it ruled that the National Trust for Historic Preservation did not have a right to sue because it lacked “standing.”
As the Court explained, “To secure standing to sue in federal court consistent… a plaintiff must establish that it has suffered an ‘injury in fact’—that is, the ‘invasion of a legally protected interest.’… Further, the plaintiff must demonstrate that its injury is ‘(a) concrete and particularized . . . and (b) actual or imminent.’”
Its ruling allowed the president to continue living outside the law.
As Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his dissent, “Pursuant to its plenary constitutional authority over the District of Columbia and federal property, Congress has explicitly prohibited the construction of any ‘building or structure . . . on any reservation, park, or public grounds of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia without express authority of Congress.’ The ballroom is a building or structure being erected on federal park grounds—President’s Park—in the District of Columbia.”
“Yet,” Roberts continued, “Congress has not passed any law resembling ‘express authority’ for the Executive’s construction of it.”
While some may rightly criticize the Court for allowing that to happen, the real villain of the piece is Congress for failing to defend its Constitutional prerogatives. Before explaining why, let me say more about the Court’s August 31 decision.
The Washington Post explains that “The National Trust’s case to stop Trump’s ballroom was built on a declaration by board member Alison Hoagland, a historian who lives on Capitol Hill and regularly walks by the White House. She said the scale, height and massing of the ballroom project damaged her ‘aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests’.”
To reach its preferred result, the Court had to dance around one of its own precedents. As Roberts explained, “(W)e said in one of our leading standing precedents that it was ‘[o]f course’ true that a ‘desire to . . . observe an animal species…even for purely esthetic purposes,’ was ‘undeniably a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.’”
The majority acted as if those sentences had never been written. “This Court,” it said, “has not found standing in circumstances like these before. To the contrary, we have repeatedly held that mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury.”
Splitting hairs in a game of “which of these things is not like the other” is, of course, what lawyers and judges do. But as Roberts noted, denying standing to the National Trust for Historic Preservation allows the president to continue acting in a way that is “likely unlawful.”
But, as I’ve already argued, the primary responsibility for allowing him to get away with that really rests with Congress, not the Court.
Congress failed in two ways.
First, the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives and the Senate voiced no objection to the president’s demolition and construction plan, and none of the relevant congressional committees convened hearings to hold the administration accountable.
In fact, several Republican members of Congress have publicly supported it. Last April, following the foiled assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents Dinner, Politico reported that House Speaker Mike Johnson “said…the structure would be a ‘safe environment’ for events. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.)…(observed that) constructing the ballroom… ‘imperative.’ And Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-Mont.) called the project ‘common sense.’”
And when the president, who promised that the ballroom would be entirely funded by private donations, asked Congress for a billion dollars to supplement those funds, Senate Majority Leader John Thune endorsed the president’s bait and switch. “We want to make sure,” he suggested, “that any additions made down there are completed in a way that ensures that the president and others in his administration are safe and secure. I do believe there’s certainly some expectation that there would be dollars allocated for that purpose that would go above and beyond the private money that’s been raised.”
Nary a word about the authority of Congress that Roberts highlighted or the illegality of his action.
James Madison must be rolling over in his grave. Recall his elaborate defense of the Constitution’s system of separated powers and checks and balances among the three branches of government.
Writing in 1788, Madison argued that “the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others….Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
“The interest of the man,” he added, “must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”
For the constitutional system to work, members of each branch of the government must stand up for and defend the prerogatives of the branch in which they serve. Acquiescing in President Trump’s ballroom plan is an abrogation of that duty by Republicans who control both the House and Senate.
But their failure doesn’t stop there.
While the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s right to sue may be debatable, there is no question that Congress itself would have had standing to sue to stop construction of the ballroom. Almost thirty years ago, in 1997, the Supreme Court held that legislatures can act as “an institutional plaintiff asserting an institutional injury…after authorizing votes in both of its chambers.”
Republicans should know that. A little more than a decade ago, the House of Representatives, then controlled by the GOP, voted to sue President Obama over the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. The lawsuit alleged that “Sylvia Burwell, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Jacob Lew, the Secretary of the Treasury, and their respective departments …have spent billions of unappropriated dollars to support the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (and)… that Secretary Lew and Treasury have… effectively amended the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate by delaying its effect and narrowing its scope.”
The courts allowed the suit to proceed. Congress is failing the American people in many ways, but none is more consequential than standing idly by while the president ignores laws it passed and the authority granted to it by the Constitution.
The White House ballroom will be a monument to its failure.
Austin Sarat
Austin D. Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is an internationally renowned scholar whose interdisciplinary work examines law in relation to culture, violence, and the liberal arts. His academic foundation includes a B.A. from Providence College (1969), an M.A. (1970) and Ph.D. (1973) from the University of Wisconsin, and a J.D. from Yale Law School (1988). He has also received honorary degrees, including an LL.D. from Providence College (2008) and an A.M. from Amherst College (1984). Sarat has also been awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize at Amherst in 2022 and the Ronald Pipkin Service Award as well as many others.
