Over the previous 12 months, US Solicitor General D. John Sauer has been pushing the boundaries of the legislation on the Supreme Court with a supply that’s quickfire, confrontational and imbued with MAGA perspective.
President Donald Trump has welcomed it — and the excessive courtroom has not resisted it.
Sauer, whose hard-hitting positions and uncompromising method might need turned off the justices of even a decade in the past, has been spared the sort of humiliating questions that Chief Justice John Roberts typically aimed on the Obama administration solicitor general workforce.
His hyperbole goes unchecked. And he has largely escaped the admonishment that predecessors as solicitor general acquired after they modified the federal government’s place.
Most considerably, Sauer has locked arms with the 6-3 conservative supermajority in its drive to boost govt energy and overhaul voting rights and election legislation.
How far that goes shall be seen in upcoming weeks because the justices are scheduled to complete the present time period by July 1. The majority has already sided with the administration in a raft of preliminary challenges to the Trump agenda, permitting him to start dismantling federal businesses, diminishing worldwide assist and dashing deportations of undocumented migrants.
Sauer first linked with Trump as his private lawyer, winning him immunity from legal prosecution on the Supreme Court in 2024. Earlier, as Missouri solicitor general, he was on the vanguard of a last-ditch state lawsuit protesting the 2020 presidential election outcomes that ousted Trump.
Sauer has defied the studied detachment of the solicitor general’s workplace and overtly retained his MAGA-warrior sensibility. When the administration misplaced the dispute over Trump’s tariffs on international items — a uncommon, conspicuous defeat — Sauer was on the president’s facet as he denounced the justices. Standing earlier than tv cameras, Trump referred to as justices “an embarrassment to their families.”
His arguments in that Supreme Court case have been a number of the most politically charged of the present session.
He conveyed the president’s message in his opening to the justices: “On April 2, President Trump determined that our exploding trade deficits had brought us to the brink of an economic and national security catastrophe.” Echoing the president, Sauer warned that reversing the tariffs “would expose us to ruthless trade retaliation by far more aggressive countries and drive America from strength to failure, with ruinous economic and national security consequences.”
Lawyers who maintain the US solicitor general publish have actually mirrored the political occasion of the president who appointed them. But most within the function often called “the 10th justice” have tried to current a dispassionate demeanor and extra clearly stability the general pursuits of the federal authorities.
Roy Englert, who has practiced earlier than the Supreme Court for 4 many years, together with within the Eighties as an lawyer within the US solicitor general’s workplace, says Sauer has disrupted the mannequin.
“The solicitor general, consistent with the president and the rest of administration, has been more aggressive than in the first Trump term or prior Republican or Democratic administrations,” Englert stated.
His tactic will work, Englert added, provided that it “aligns with the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudential preferences.”
The solicitor general in Trump’s first time period was Noel Francisco, way more a product of the Washington Republican institution, working with an administration extra restrained than within the second time period. Francisco additionally confronted a 5-4 conservative-liberal bench; with at present’s extra right-wing vote, the bulk has been transferring to the appropriate quicker.
Sauer, to make certain, isn’t persuading the justices to go wherever they are not already certain. The administration’s loss within the dispute over his sweeping tariffs confirmed the bounds of the Trump administration advocacy.
But the Supreme Court’s current evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act demonstrated the place the the solicitor general may information the courtroom. The determination in Louisiana v. Callais flowed from a decades-long drive led by Roberts. Yet it drew on arguments that Sauer’s workforce had crafted to subvert a key Voting Rights Act part with out overruling it.
Dissenting Justice Elena Kagan acknowledged the affect of the solicitor general’s workplace, referring at one level to “the Solicitor General, whose ideas about how to upend (a 1986 voting-rights precedent) the majority largely filches.”
In the vein of the solicitor general’s “friend-of-the-court” temporary, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for almost all, minimized the implications of the brand new take a look at for alleging discrimination in redistricting and stated, “We need only update the framework …”
The Trump administration had switched the Justice Department place within the long-running Louisiana controversy, withdrawing assist for a state map with two Black-majority congressional districts among the many complete six.
Trump, after listening to that the courtroom invalidated that map in a choice that will assist Republicans, responded, “I love it.”
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Sauer, 51, got here to nationwide prominence in 2024 as he received Trump substantial immunity from legal prosecution. Trump had been accused of election fraud, conspiracy and different offences in connection together with his protest of the election outcomes that validly gave Joe Biden the White House in 2020.
Even earlier than that landmark ruling in Trump v. United States, Sauer had confirmed his allegiance to Trump. Sauer helped lead a bunch of states backing a Supreme Court problem to the end result of the 2020 election. The justices rapidly dismissed the case, Texas v. Pennsylvania.
The week after Trump regained the White House in November 2024, he introduced he would nominate Sauer to be US solicitor general, the federal government’s high lawyer earlier than the Supreme Court.
In that publish, Sauer has regularly cited the case of Trump v. United States as grounds for better govt energy on this second Trump time period. That Roberts opinion for the courtroom emphasised the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” authority.
One pending case, Trump v. Slaughter, could lead on the courtroom to greenlight Trump’s removing of unbiased company officers earlier than their phrases are up. When the controversy centered on former Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter got here earlier than the justices in December, Sauer burdened in his temporary that, “The President must control all exercises of executive power.”
Adapting language from the immunity case, Sauer additionally asserted, “Just two Terms ago, the Court reiterated that the President’s ‘conclusive and preclusive’ ‘power to remove executive officers of the United States whom he has appointed may not be regulated by Congress or reviewed by the courts.’ That conclusive and preclusive removal power includes the authority to remove at will the presidentially appointed heads of multimember administrative agencies, such as the FTC.”
During oral arguments, he was adamant relating to expansive presidential energy. He additionally strategically lifted a line from Roberts as he urged the courtroom to overturn a 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that had restricted the president’s removing authority.
“Humphrey’s Executor has become a decaying husk with bold and particularly dangerous pretensions,” Sauer asserted, utilizing a Roberts phrase from a 2024 decision that overturned a 40-year precept of judicial deference to federal businesses.
Duncan Hosie, a authorized scholar on the Stanford Constitutional Law Center, criticizes Sauer for furthering what Hosie calls “the Trump project.”
“Previous SGs, including in Republican administrations, did not subjugate the office entirely to the president,” Hosie stated, including that Sauer “benefits from a court that is both sympathetic to Trump as an individual and to the framework of the conservative legal movement.”
Sauer affords Trump, and the excessive courtroom, a definite mix of zeal and credential.
He obtained a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, Harvard legislation diploma, and clerkship with the late conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia, whom Trump has lengthy held up as the perfect. Unlike many attorneys with that elite expertise, nevertheless, Sauer left Washington. He returned house to the St. Louis space, serving as an assistant US lawyer, then turning to non-public follow, earlier than turning into the state solicitor general. He additionally started working on right-wing priorities, together with towards abortion rights and LGBTQ rights.
The culture-wars emphasis made him a great match for Trump and for a excessive courtroom that has rolled again reproductive rights and protections for transgender folks.
In their very own methods, Trump, Sauer and the Supreme Court have defied the norm. Unlike a lot of the final half-century, when the bench was ideologically break up 5-4, the present Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative supermajority. The right-wing management was cemented in late 2020 with Trump’s appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
At the lectern within the conventional grey morning coat, the gravelly voiced Sauer is all motion. He gestures briskly, his shoulders pump up and down, as he promotes the president’s authorized agenda.
Trump has watched Sauer in a courtroom 4 instances, the primary three as he was representing him personally in decrease courts. In November 2023, Sauer argued against a gag order in Trump’s election subversion case within the DC Circuit; then in January 2024, the first appeal for Trump in his effort to be immune from legal prosecution; and in September 2024, an appeal of a New York jury’s finding that Trump had sexually abused E. Jean Carroll and its award to her of $5 million.
The fourth alternative got here final month on the Supreme Court, throughout the dispute over the president’s order trying to finish birthright citizenship for youngsters born of people that lack citizenship.
Trump signed the order on January 20, 2025, his first day again in workplace, and it was swiftly blocked by decrease courtroom judges. It conflicts with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which ensures birthright citizenship to all individuals born or naturalized within the United States, and with long-standing Supreme Court precedent.
Sauer doubtless understood the long-shot nature of the case, and Trump himself has predicted defeat. In a rambling Truth Social publish earlier this month, he wrote, “based on what I witnessed recently by being the first President in History to attend a Supreme Court session … they will be ruling against us on Birthright Citizenship, making us the only Country in the World that practices this unsustainable, unsafe, and incredibly costly DISASTER.” (In reality, many different nations within the Western Hemisphere, together with Canada and Mexico, present such automated citizenship.)
The president in that publish criticized the courtroom for declining to publicly acknowledge him. Trump attended as a litigant within the spectator seats. Regarding what he perceived as a slight, he wrote that the “fact was not even recognized or acknowledged, out of respect for the position of President, by the Court – Something which did not go unnoticed by the Fake News Media!”
For all of the president’s complaints concerning the courtroom, the conservative majority is more often than not aligned with him, persevering with to bolster the president’s total govt energy.
And Sauer has by no means confronted the pummeling different SGs skilled by the hands of the bulk. Liberal justices have often requested him to decelerate, and Roberts chastised him throughout a January argument for interrupting a justice mid-question.
But the chief justice doesn’t problem Sauer the way in which he confronted Kagan (when she was solicitor general earlier than President Barack Obama named her to the courtroom) or her successor Donald Verrilli. Roberts was significantly unyielding when the topic was race, for instance quizzing Verrilli on elusive voting statistics to recommend sure Voting Rights Act protections have been not wanted.
In a 2013 case, Roberts asked Verrilli, “Do you know which state has the worst ratio of White voter turnout to African American voter turnout?” When Verrilli, defending the 1965 VRA, stated he didn’t, Roberts stated, “Massachusetts,” and added, “Do you know what has the best, where African American turnout actually exceeds White turnout? Mississippi.”
Often when liberals pounce on Sauer’s arguments, conservatives come to his protection. That occurred within the Trump v. Slaughter case that might give the president a freer hand to fireside the heads of unbiased regulatory businesses.
“Counsel,” senior liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor started as she challenged Sauer’s argument for the reversal of precedent, “So you’re thinking or you’re arguing that the reasoning of the more current justices on this Court have more purchase than the views of renowned jurists like (Oliver Wendell) Holmes and (Louis) Brandeis … you’re suggesting that we have a better view than … all of those previous justices about what absolute executive power means?”
Just a few beats later, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one in all Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, threw him a lifeline.
“In response to Justice Sotomayor’s question, you have (Chief Justice William Howard) Taft and Scalia, right? That’s not too shabby.”
“I think those are outstanding jurists,” Sauer rejoined enthusiastically, “and, with respect to Justice Scalia in particular, one of the greatest jurists in the history of the court.”