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The East Wing is already gone. The replacement ballroom is already under construction. Now a federal appeals court has stepped in and effectively said, “Okay, now stop.”The D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 that above-ground construction on President Trump’s planned $400 million White House ballroom must halt, concluding that a president cannot make a transformation of this magnitude without congressional authorization. The ruling is temporarily on hold for 14 days, giving the administration time to seek Supreme Court review.There is a serious constitutional issue here, and conservatives should not pretend otherwise just because Trump is the president. Congress has real authority over federal property. Presidents are not kings, and constitutional limits matter even when we like the person occupying the office.But judicial limits matter too.Trump-appointed Judge Neomi Rao dissented, arguing that the injunction goes beyond the proper role of the federal courts and accusing the judiciary of taking over supervision of White House construction. That is not a throwaway objection. It goes directly to the separation-of-powers problem at the center of the case.And then there is the obvious problem illustrated by the cartoon.If the project was so clearly outside presidential authority that courts needed to freeze it, why did the system reach this point after the East Wing had already been demolished?That does not decide who is legally right. It does show how dysfunctional these separation-of-powers fights have become. Litigation moves slowly, construction moves quickly, and by the time judges act, the facts on the ground may already be irreversible.The fact that private donors are funding the ballroom does not automatically settle the issue either. The legal question is not merely who writes the check, it is who has the authority to make a major permanent change to the White House complex.Now the Supreme Court may get the next word.Should Congress have to approve a major White House construction project like this, or is the appeals court intruding too far into presidential authority?