The Daily Fuckup

The Eleventh Circuit was not deciding the White House ballroom dispute. It was deciding a different case, issued April 21, 2026, about a federal procurement rule tied to project labor agreements — a rule rooted in a Biden-era executive order but litigated after the administration changed hands.

The panel upheld the denial of a preliminary injunction. But one concurrence said the majority leaned too hard on Supreme Court decisions such as Learning Resources v. Trump and Trump v. Hawaii. In the concurrence’s view, those cases involved different statutes and different presidential powers, so they did not do the work the majority wanted them to do in this procurement dispute.

That is the useful part of the opinion. It shows a judge on the same appellate court insisting that broad language about executive power is not a substitute for reading the statute in front of the court. The concurrence did not decide the ballroom fight, and it did not rewrite the law of presidential deference. It did something narrower: it said the analogy to other presidential-power cases was too loose for this one.

The underlying question is familiar. When the government points to sweeping Supreme Court language about presidential authority, does that language actually fit the statute being challenged, or is it just being used as rhetorical cover? Here, the concurrence said the fit was not close enough.

That makes the opinion worth watching even outside the procurement case itself. Courts still have to work from text, context, and the limits Congress wrote into the law. In this decision, the concurrence suggested the majority got closer to slogan than statute when it reached for presidential-deference precedents that came from a different legal setting.