John Roberts just let Trump 'override the law once again': legal scholar

Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/Pool via REUTERS

President Donald Trump's proposed White House ballroom has encountered a series of green lights and red lights in the lower federal courts. On Friday, August 21, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary stay of a lower court injunction that blocks construction of the ballroom until Trump gets the go-ahead from Congress. And according to legal scholar and former federal prosector Kimberly Wehle, Roberts is ignoring the U.S. Constitution.

"All the lower court did was push the pause button to enable Congress to weigh in," Wehle explains in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark. "The judge had no other choice, which is why the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed the ruling but gave Trump 14 days to ask the Supreme Court to intervene. Trump got what he wanted: the High Court let him override the law with impunity once again ... The Supreme Court has no legal power to suspend or revise the operation of the Constitution or statutory law."

Wehle continues, "The Constitution's Property Clause (Article IV, Section 3, Clause 2) gives Congress the complete power to manage, regulate, and sell all land and property belonging to the United States."

The law professor stresses that under the U.S. Constitution, a major construction project like a White House ballroom requires approval from Congress.

"There is no wiggle room for presidents to override or outmaneuver Congress when it comes to federal property," according to Wehle. "Trump's lawyers didn't even bother to argue to the lower courts that there is ... The power to manage federal property begins and ends with Congress. But Trump's lawyers ballooned that statute into a capacious grant of absolute power to demolish chunks of the building."

Wehle continues, "All along, all that Trump had to do was go to his friendly majorities in both chambers to greenlight this vanity project. This he refused to do, betting that he could run out the clock on the courts and literally bulldoze through any legal barrier until it's basically a fait accompli. That's precisely the argument Solicitor General John Sauer is making now. John Roberts apparently bought it. Ballroom aside, what Roberts did is astonishingly destructive to the rule of law and democracy itself, for several reasons. For starters, it ignores the Property Clause. It also ignores binding statutory law ... Never mind that the Supreme Court is not democratically elected and has no authority to amend the Constitution. That requires supermajorities in both houses and the support of three quarters of the state legislatures. It can strike down statutes if they are unconstitutional, but it has no power to simply dispense with them in a one-line order."

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