Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is rarely on the losing side of Supreme Court decisions. He is even less frequently on the losing side of high-profile rulings. And he is hardly ever in dissent in cases in which he stands alone with the court’s three liberal justices. But that is where the chief justice found himself on Monday, when the Supreme Court’s five other Republican nominees voted to allow President Trump’s lavish White House ballroom project to move ahead, likely putting it back on track to completion, despite questions about the legality of the construction.

The case showed the limits of the chief justice’s ability to assemble a majority on the bench he has led for more than two decades, and the limits of the court’s capacity to restrain the president’s boundary-pushing approach to governing. The court’s other five conservatives concluded that the group that sued did not have legal standing to do so. They did not address the legality of the project, which is estimated to cost $400 million.

As a history buff, Chief Justice Roberts infused his dissent with the words of Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt, showing his appreciation for preservation. In his understated way, he suggested that he was distressed by what the president was doing to the White House without seeking congressional approval. The mere millions Congress allocated for “ordinary Executive Residence maintenance,” such as refurnishing, air conditioning and lighting, the chief justice wrote, “likely does not authorize the president to use hundreds of millions of dollars in private donations to tear down the East Wing and construct a ballroom in its stead.” The construction, he concluded bluntly, was “likely unlawful.”

Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Harvard, said it was a significant statement for the chief justice to assign himself the dissent and to write at length in a case that came to the court on its quick-turn emergency docket. “He writes expansively and treats it with a level of significance, and he’s quite passionate,” said Professor Lazarus, a close observer of the Roberts-led court. Instead of writing a technical, brief rebuttal, the chief justice “suggests this kind of assertion of presidential authority was particularly objectionable,” Professor Lazarus added.