Ep. 2050 - Trump Secures Huge Win In The Supreme Court

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**Michael Knowles** (0:56)
This episode is brought to you by Cardiff, America's favorite small business lender with over 12 billion funded since 2004 Applying under three minutes for same-day funding up to 500,000 at cardiff.co.noles. Okay, I'm still on the road in Europe in my super secret project that I can't tell you about, but probably you'll know a lot about it soon.
I will be back in the studio in a couple of days, at most, who knows, maybe sooner, but I had to come to you because of the major news from the Supreme Court that President Trump gets his ballroom. Though this case is actually about a lot more than just President Trump, and certainly about a lot more than a ballroom. If you haven't followed it, I've given some updates on it, but it's such a stupid story that it actually bothers me to talk about it.
President Trump is trying to build a ballroom at the White House. I've been to the White House a handful of times.
It's great. It's a lovely, but it's an older building and they host a lot of functions. I've never been invited to a state dinner or anything like that. But from what I hear, it's small and they have a difficulty doing that and they have to erect all sorts of tents on the lawn and then it rains. It's just not the thing that the global hegemon should do. It seems to me reasonable to think that the global hegemon, the greatest country on earth, should be able to have a place for dinner. Right? Seems pretty easy. But no, if Trump says the sky is blue, Democrats have to say it's orange. If Trump says that the moon is made of rock, they have to say that it's made of green cheese. So he goes to build this nice ballroom and the Democrats make a big fuss about it. This works its way up to the Supreme Court. Now you say, how does it even make it to the Supreme Court? Well, the people who claim to have standing are the National Trust for Historic Preservation. And that's the key to this case. Because after months and months of all this fighting about it, in a 5-4 split decision, you got the conservatives in the majority, you have the liberals plus John Roberts, again, in the minority, you have Trump winning this case. And the argument that the majority made was not even ruling so much on the substance of the case, but rather staying this lower court ruling that was stopping the construction because the president of the United States thought the White House should have a ballroom.
The reason, the argument of the majority was that the National Trust for Historic Preservation does not have standing to go in and stop the president from redecorating the White House.
The argument from the National Trust for Historic Preservation was basically that when I'm walking along Pennsylvania Avenue, I can sometimes squint and see the east wing of the White House, and so I have a right to tell you what sort of renovations you can make. It's like the most super-duper Karen HOA kind of busybody that you've ever seen in your life, and the court ruled, no, you don't have the right to do that, and the lower courts don't have the right to impose this undue burden that would make the renovation much more costly and that would call into question its ultimate success. You don't have the right to do that. And so I think the real key here, forget about the ballroom for a second, though there is more to say about that. The real key here is, who should have more power in a Democratic Republic such as ours? Should the duly elected president who basically won the popular vote have a little power, not over everything, not to be a totalitarian dictator, not to be an authoritarian ruler, but to like at least renovate the White House a little bit, just like a little bit so that people can have dinner there when the prime minister of Uzbekistan comes over for dinner? Can the president at least do that?