Trump takes narrow Supreme Court rulings as big wins

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Trump takes narrow Supreme Court rulings as big wins
The construction of a massive White House ballroom is moving full steam ahead after the Supreme Court found a historic preservation group likely had no right to stop it.
“We have a lot of very happy construction workers,” President Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Wednesday. The $400 million project on the site of the former East Wing, he said, was “under budget and ahead of schedule.”
It’s yet another example of the president taking a narrow procedural ruling as permission to press ahead with a contested piece of his agenda — often before courts have even had a chance to fully weigh in on whether the actions are lawful.
“That’s one way in which they are using a procedural management tool to actually have substantial consequences because when the court on the shadow docket decides to lift an injunction or stay a lower court’s injunction, it basically allows the government to continue doing what it was doing,” said Melissa Murray, a professor at New York University’s School of Law and co-host of the podcast “Strict Scrutiny.”
The Supreme Court’s majority held in the ballroom case that one member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s “mere offense, disagreement, or distaste” was not enough to qualify for standing — effectively greenlighting the above-ground construction that had been halted by lower courts.
In doing so, the majority sidestepped the question of whether Trump had the authority to tear down the East Wing without congressional approval. The Trump administration has insisted it doesn’t need express authorization and maintains it abided by the required review and permitting processes.
Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by the three liberal justices, wrote in a dissenting opinion that the president’s actions were “likely unlawful” and disagreed that the plaintiffs didn’t have standing.
“The White House is not just any building, and—when it comes to historic preservation— [Alice] Hoagland is not just any person,” Roberts wrote. “In failing to appreciate as much, the Court misconceives the plaintiff ’s injury, allowing the Executive’s likely infringement of the Legislature’s power of the purse and authority to regulate federal property in the District of Columbia to continue.”
The majority’s reasoning meant around-the-clock construction on the above-ground portion of the ballroom could continue without delay. The administration has touted the space as vital to national security following recent attempts on Trump’s life.
Experts said the court’s interpretation of standing leaves Congress as the only viable challenger. But even if the issue wound its way back through the courts and was eventually found unlawful, it may be too late to reverse course because the ballroom is already standing.
“At that point, a court asking to halt further construction won’t do much by granting that relief n—which could itself undermine any request for an injunction in the first place,” said Joshua Wurtzel, a partner at Schlam Stone & Doland LLP who specializes in construction litigation.
“Thus, the real risk to a challenger here isn’t losing on the merits — it’s the project being finished before any court gets there,” he added.
The ballroom is not an isolated example.
The Trump administration has successfully used the emergency docket to advance Trump’s priorities numerous times during his second term, securing a temporary win in his efforts to restrict mail-in voting for the midterms as recently as last week.
In that case, the majority found that a group of Democratic-led states had challenged new U.S. Postal Service regulations too early and tossed out a lower court injunction. The matter is now back on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket after the Justice Department asked the justices on Thursday to lift a Boston-based federal judge’s second block.
Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson argued in dissent to the first mail-in voting ruling that her conservative colleagues were helping facilitate the administration’s “Catch-Me-If-You-Can approach” by granting interim relief while the merits are still being weighed.
And the White Houe doesn’t deny that Trump is moving quickly to implement his agenda.
“President Trump is moving at lightning speed because we don’t have time to waste in our mission to make America greater than ever before,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement.
The concept of the emergency docket has been around since the court’s inception, historically reserved as a process for handling urgent matters. But its usage grew significantly under the first Trump administration, according to Murray.
“It’s bringing more and more substantive questions that would not have been heard on the court’s shadow docket to the court on the shadow docket they’re answering them,” she said on the current administration, also noting it ramped up under former President Biden.
“The difference I think between when the Biden administration did this and when the first and second Trump administrations did this is that, you know, the Trump administration has been far more successful in getting what they wanted,” Murray added.
In April 2025, the Supreme Court set aside a judge’s order that had temporarily blocked the Trump administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to remove Venezuelans from the country, handing the president temporary approval to resume deportations.
Similar rulings also allowed the second Trump administration to withhold $4 billion in foreign aid and keep frozen various grant funding while lower court challenges continued.
Oftentimes, these decisions are unsigned and come without any explanation.
Such was the case last summer when the majority allowed the Trump administration to move forward with plans to dismantle the Education Department by lifting a judge’s order to reinstate hundreds of employees that had been laid off.
The majority offered no reasoning for its decision, which the three liberals cast as “indefensible” in a dissenting opinion.
“The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.
And though emergency rulings can ultimately be overturned down the line, Murray notes that only examining procedural questions like standing and ripeness leaves the Trump administration to claim victory even if the reality is more complicated.
“I think many people don’t understand that a ruling on jurisdiction is not the same as a ruling on the merit, so you know it really does give the administration an opportunity to talk about how they won at the Supreme Court, which is technically true, but obviously doesn’t make the whole situation as clear as it could be,” she said.
Mallory Wilson contributed.
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