Hours before a court order to pause construction on Donald Trump’s Versailles ballroom was due to take effect, the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice, John Roberts, gave his (presumably) favorite felon and sexual predator an indefinite pass to keep going.
As The New York Times noted, a three-judge appeals court panel in Washington, D.C. ruled that Trump did not have the authority to seize Congress’ power to “dramatically redesign, reshape and reconstruct the White House — the People’s House.” But the court had agreed to pause its injunction until Friday. “Construction has continued in the interim,” The Times noted.
Now, Roberts has given Trump a wink and a nod to go ahead and finish it. “In a one-sentence order, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., acting on his own, issued a placeholder that gives all nine justices additional time to more fully consider whether construction of the planned 90,000-square-foot ballroom can proceed,” The Times reported. “The chief justice’s order did not provide a timeline for when the court would act next.”
Although Roberts cloaked his order under some veil of jurisprudence, he has to know that the effect is to allow Trump to overstep his role and to finish turning the People’s House into a Trump Versailles.
As The Times pointed out in an earlier article, on August 18, Trump has already been “racing against the clock” to finish the ballroom. “He has enlisted a team of 250 workers to push ahead with construction 20 hours a day, seven days a week to complete as much work as quickly as possible,” the article said. The ballroom was estimated to be 65% complete already.
In other words, the obvious game for Trump and his White House puppets is to make it impossible to stop the construction.
John Roberts just gave his blessing and an assist to the whole rotten scheme.