#dc-circuit
4 entries with this tag
A Federal Appeals Court Ordered Trump to Stop Building His Ballroom Until Congress Approves It — So Instead of Asking Congress, His DOJ Ran to the Supreme Court's Shadow Docket to Override the Order, Arguing the Demolition and Construction Can't Wait Because of a "Recent Missile Threat on Air Force One"
On August 7, 2026, a majority of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ordered construction of Trump's roughly $900 million White House ballroom halted unless the administration obtains congressional approval — reaffirming the principle a district judge had already stated in voiding the project earlier: "The President Is Not the Owner." The White House does not belong to the president; he cannot unilaterally demolish and rebuild it, or spend the public's money on it, without Congress. Rather than go to Congress, the administration went to the Supreme Court. On the shadow docket, the Justice Department asked the justices to stay the injunction and let construction continue — and the justification it offered was a "recent missile threat on Air Force One," arguing that the ballroom's hardened, bomb- and missile-resistant construction is too urgent to pause. Chief Justice John Roberts set a deadline for the challengers to respond. The move is the now-familiar pattern: told by a court to stop, the administration neither complies nor persuades Congress but sprints to the Supreme Court to have the check overridden — dressing a vanity building project, whose cost quadrupled to nearly $900 million and whose funds were partly diverted without Congress, in the language of an emergency national-security threat.
The Administration Spent the Summer Trying to Strip Legal Status From 350,000 Haitians and Send Them Back to a Country Ruled by Gangs — Losing in Court After Court but Never Stopping, Until the Whiplash of Last-Minute Reprieves Was Already Separating Families and Costing People Their Jobs
About 350,000 Haitians who have lived and worked legally in the United States under Temporary Protected Status spent the summer of 2026 in engineered limbo. TPS exists precisely because a country is too dangerous to return people to, and Haiti — where armed gangs control most of the capital, there is no elected government, and the humanitarian situation is catastrophic — is the textbook case. The Trump administration moved to terminate the designation anyway. In June the Supreme Court cleared the way for terminations to proceed; but lower courts kept intervening, granting a February stay and then a series of last-minute reprieves that pushed the cutoff from February to July 10, to July 24, to July 27, as a D.C. Circuit panel rejected the administration's bid to end protections on 48 hours' notice. The Department of Homeland Security and the federal courts remain openly at odds. The practical result is not an orderly policy but chaos: families bracing for separation with days' notice, and employers — confused by work permits that are technically auto-extended but bear expired dates — already letting Haitian workers go, even though rejecting valid extended documents is itself unlawful. Whether or not the courts ultimately let the termination stand, the administration has already inflicted the harm: a third of a million people made to live week to week on whether they will be deported to a collapsed state, their jobs and families unraveling in the uncertainty the government manufactured.
White House Secretly Pressured the Board Meant to Protect Civil Servants — Sherk Told MSPB Head to Follow "the Company Line," Board Then Broke with Decades of Precedent, and 50,000 Workers Lost Protections
A New York Times investigation by Michael Schmidt reveals that the Trump White House secretly pressured the Merit Systems Protection Board — the independent agency created after Nixonian abuses to protect federal employees from political firings — into adopting the administration's theory that the president can fire any civil servant at will. White House aide James Sherk, author of the Schedule F memo and a man who has said "every federal employee should serve at the pleasure of the president," met with acting MSPB head Henry Kerner while Kerner was being considered for a permanent position. Sherk told Kerner he was expected to follow the Office of Legal Counsel's opinions on unitary executive theory — described by experts as "little different from calling a federal judge and telling him how to rule." The MSPB then broke with decades of precedent and ruled that it could weigh in on constitutional questions in a way that effectively endorsed the president's power to fire employees without cause. This followed Trump firing Democratic MSPB member Cathy Harris in February 2025 — converting the bipartisan board into one controlled by his appointees — and the Supreme Court blocking her reinstatement via shadow docket. On March 9, 2026, the Schedule Policy/Career rule took effect, stripping civil service protections from up to 50,000 federal workers, making them at-will employees who cannot appeal firings to the MSPB, cannot access statutory whistleblower protections, and cannot challenge their reclassification. An initial executive order reclassified about 8,000 positions. When DOJ prosecutor Maureen Comey (daughter of James Comey) was fired via an Article II letter, a federal judge ruled she could bypass the compromised MSPB and sue directly in federal court — finding the constitutional basis for her firing placed her case "outside the universe" Congress intended the MSPB to resolve. The D.C. Circuit dissent warned: "Under my colleagues' reasoning, it appears that no independent agencies may lawfully exist in this country."
Trump Makes Emergency Demand to Keep His Name on the Kennedy Center — Gets Rejected Twice — Workers Peel It Off Overnight as Crowds Chant "Take It Down"
On the June 12 deadline to remove Trump's name from the Kennedy Center, the administration filed emergency motions to delay — rejected by Judge Cooper, then rejected again by the D.C. Circuit appeals court at 7:15 PM. At midnight, the name was still up and the board was in contempt. They blamed thunderstorms and asked for 12 more hours. Beatty's attorneys called it "a manufactured emergency" and "gamesmanship." Hundreds gathered on the plaza in 110°F heat, chanting "take it down." A drag queen paraded with bubble machines. Jim Acosta led chants. A double rainbow appeared after the appeals court ruling. One man begged workers: "Start with the T!" At 12:50 AM, tarps went up — the crowd booed, denied the satisfaction of watching. By 4 AM Saturday, workers had pried off the 18 letters spelling "The Donald J. Trump and." It lasted six months. Trump posted he had "no interest" in continuing "what could only be a hopeless journey into NEVER NEVER LAND."