| The Justice Department went to the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon in an effort to clear the way for construction of Donald Trump’s White House ballroom. It was the first major DOJ filing since Todd Blanche’s confirmation as Attorney General, and it was proof that nothing is going to change anytime soon at the department. |
| In April, a district court judge issued a preliminary injunction to temporarily halt construction on the site, but the order allowed the administration to continue construction below ground, and above ground as necessary for security purposes. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed that decision ten days ago. Both courts concluded that the plaintiff, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, was likely to prevail on its central claim that the project is illegal because Congress has not authorized it. |
| The Justice Department is now asking the Supreme Court to overturn that ruling and to greenlight construction of the ballroom immediately. The application continues several running themes of the Trump-Blanche DOJ — its willingness to waste taxpayer resources to advance Trump’s personal interests in the courts, to gratuitously attack the lower courts and then run to the Supreme Court for help, and to offer self-serving factual claims that are questionable at best and pretextual at worst in an effort to impose political pressure on the justices. |
| The lawyering has been bad from the start. The first substantive brief filed by the DOJ was riddled with typos, formatting problems, and grammatical errors. So was the “corrected” version. |
| Shortly after the district court issued its preliminary injunction, the government filed a brief that contained two introductory pages that read as if they were pulled straight from Trump’s Truth Social feed. Several days later, Blanche strongly suggested to a group of law school students that Trump had written those pages himself. |
| The administration’s Supreme Court application is particularly shameless in its framing of the issue. When the litigation began, the administration told the court that the purpose of the project was to build “expanded event space to address growing visitor demand and provide a venue suitable for significant events.” |
| On Friday, the Justice Department turned the rationale behind the project on its head, describing it as an “integrated military complex, including a totally secure ballroom space,” that “is vitally required by national security.” |
| In other words, in order to build Trump’s ballroom, a whole bunch of expensive security measures were required. Those security measures have now become the new rationale for the project, and we are all supposed to believe that the ballroom — which Trump has bragged about extensively — just happens to be attached to all of that other stuff. |
| The DOJ’s application is also supported by declarations from a group of national security officials who are in their positions because of their loyalty to Trump — precisely so that they will do things like this. |
| The group includes the newly confirmed Director of National Intelligence, Jay Clayton, a reverse DEI hire who holds the position despite having no relevant experience or expertise. He came to the job after a stint as Manhattan U.S. Attorney (another job that he lacked the qualifications to hold and abused to serve Trump’s interests). After less than three weeks in his new job, Clayton is now in a position to inform the Supreme Court that Trump’s ballroom project is “critical” for security purposes and “will improve the level of protection and ability to manage and mitigate threats to the President and senior government officials.” |
| This is not the first time that the Justice Department has enlisted senior administration officials in a clumsy effort to create the appearance of factual support for its position. |
| When Trump’s “emergency” tariffs were in the courts, three Cabinet officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, submitted declarations claiming that the global order would essentially collapse if the tariffs were thrown out. When the case went before the Supreme Court, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent submitted a declaration that — bizarrely — attached a letter from a friend of his who said that the lower courts’ rulings were “repulsive, repugnant, and utterly indefensible.” |
| This was a transparent effort to blackmail the Court, and it failed when a majority of the justices threw out the tariffs anyway. The predictions of global doom were promptly forgotten, but they were not that different from the claims that the DOJ is now making about how Trump and other White House officials’ lives are in danger as long as Trump’s ballroom remains uncompleted. |
| There is also a gaping hole in the administration’s position in the ballroom case, both factually and legally: If the ballroom is so desperately needed for security purposes, why didn’t the administration seek congressional authorization for the project? Trump could have done so at any point — and still can — but the idea is too politically toxic even for most congressional Republicans. |
| The administration now claims that the courts below improperly inserted themselves into the project and that construction is so far along that none of it can be stopped, but even if that’s true, it’s only because it rushed forward while the litigation was pending — probably so that it could argue at some point, which has now apparently arrived, that the project cannot be halted as a practical matter. |
| The question, of course, is whether the Supreme Court’s Republican appointees are going to indulge this pretext, and unfortunately there is no clear answer. |
| In June, all six of them voted to allow to allow the Trump administration to immediately terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and Syrians. Along the way, they dismissed the voluminous record of racist statements that Trump and his allies had directed specifically at Haitians on the theory that none of the statements “was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” |
| In that case, at least, the conservative justices were willing to embrace the administration’s pretextual claims about what it was doing. |
| On the other hand, three of them — John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett — joined the three Democratic appointees in striking down Trump’s fake-emergency tariffs. They were all evidently unmoved by the overheated claims of the administration’s Cabinet officials, and a similar coalition could ultimately rule against Trump in the ballroom case as well. |
| That would be the correct outcome on the merits, and it would also give the Court’s Republican appointees a political opportunity: a chance to demonstrate some independence from the president on an issue on which the public largely opposes him — and in a context where the only actual interest at stake is Trump’s ego. |
