As the U.S. military’s deadly, ongoing and illegal campaign of air strikes against boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific nears one year, Amnesty International USA’s National Director for Government Relations, Amanda Klasing, said:

“For one year, the U.S. military has carried out a campaign of extrajudicial killings at sea that has left more than 225 people dead, with the most recent four deaths just six days ago. For just as long, we have called on Congress to take meaningful action to stop these killings, which are illegal under both international and U.S. law.

Some of the largest fossil fuel companies on Earth are disproportionately responsible for the water crisis in the American West, according to a first-of-its-kind study published Tuesday.

On Monday, a majority on the supreme court found a technical way to overrule a lower court’s imperative to stop work, while not taking a stance on whether the whole enterprise might be illegal to begin with. Preservationists, the majority held, appear to lack legal grounds for filing a suit blocking Trump’s ballroom; that means construction will proceed, even if none other than John Roberts, in a dissent, held that “those responsible” were breaking the rules in deciding “what to build up at the People’s House”. The solicitor general, John Sauer, is on record claiming that 65% of the project is completed (of course, he might have exaggerated – such things are known to have happened in Trump administrations). Either way, it is thus likely that there will be a massive structure next to the original White House; and, given that the ruling will embolden the president dramatically to change Washington DC’s landscape by spending money never approved by Congress, we might be cursed with a triumphal arch as well. All of which raises the question: what to do with a monstrous architectural legacy in post-Trump America?

On Monday, the same Supreme Court justices who helped Donald Trump return to the White House, gave him criminal immunity, and greenlit dozens of his illegal actions, gave the president yet another gift: a massive ballroom. Though it seems clear that the destruction of the East Wing and its replacement with a 90,000-square foot ballroom atop a new military bunker is illegal, the court’s Republican appointees have cleared the way for its completion.

All, that is, but one. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Democratic nominated-judges in dissent. Writing for the dissenters, Roberts called the construction “likely unlawful” and a trampling of Congressional authority. Given the unpopularity of the project, perhaps Roberts thought it best to keep his name off of it. But while Roberts clearly doesn’t want to be blamed for the ballroom, he wrote many of the precedents that undergird the majority’s decision to let it go forward.