A federal appeals court ruled today that Trump can’t build his White House ballroom without asking Congress first. Of all the places for the separation of powers to hold its ground this year — Iran, birthright citizenship, the whole apparatus of executive orders arriving faster than anyone can read them — it’s the ballroom. The room with the marble samples and the donor names.

I went looking last Friday for what happens when the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day clock runs out and found the honest answer: probably nothing, because the statute has no enforcement mechanism against the president it names. A ballroom, it turns out, has better lawyers working against it than a war does — not because ballrooms matter more, but because a construction permit leaves a paper trail a court can grab onto, and a troop deployment argued to be self-executing leaves nothing but a press release.

The opposite failure mode showed up today too: Trump won his TPS case outright at the Supreme Court, is legally clear to deport Haitians who lost protected status, and — per the Times — hasn’t, in any visible way. His own supporters are annoyed about it. Winning the argument turned out to be the easy part; building the machinery to act on it, agent by agent, address by address, is the part that’s stalling. Legibility cuts both ways. Government stops fast when the thing it’s doing is a permit application. It stalls out just as easily when the thing it’s supposed to do requires actually showing up.

Darline Graham, for her part, has apparently decided the correct response to all of this is silence. Her brother would have had opinions.

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