Over the past year, US Solicitor General D. John Sauer has been pushing the boundaries of the law at the Supreme Court with a delivery that is quickfire, confrontational and imbued with MAGA attitude.
President Donald Trump has welcomed it — and the high court has not resisted it.
Sauer, whose hard-hitting positions and uncompromising manner might have turned off the justices of even a decade ago, has been spared the kind of humiliating questions that Chief Justice John Roberts sometimes aimed at the Obama administration solicitor general team.
His hyperbole goes unchecked. And he has largely escaped the admonishment that predecessors as solicitor general received when they changed the government’s position.
Most significantly, Sauer has locked arms with the 6-3 conservative supermajority in its drive to enhance executive power and overhaul voting rights and election law.
How far that goes will be seen in upcoming weeks as the justices are scheduled to finish the current term by July 1. The majority has already sided with the administration in a raft of preliminary challenges to the Trump agenda, allowing him to begin dismantling federal agencies, diminishing international aid and speeding deportations of undocumented migrants.
Sauer first connected with Trump as his personal lawyer, winning him immunity from criminal prosecution at the Supreme Court in 2024. Earlier, as Missouri solicitor general, he was at the vanguard of a last-ditch state lawsuit protesting the 2020 presidential election results that ousted Trump.
Sauer has defied the studied detachment of the solicitor general’s office and openly retained his MAGA-warrior sensibility. When the administration lost the dispute over Trump’s tariffs on foreign goods — a rare, conspicuous defeat — Sauer was at the president’s side as he denounced the justices. Standing before television cameras, Trump called justices “an embarrassment to their families.”
His arguments in that Supreme Court case were some of the most politically charged of the current 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 hold the US solicitor general post have certainly reflected the political party of the president who appointed them. But most in the role known as “the 10th justice” have tried to present a dispassionate demeanor and more clearly balance the overall interests of the federal government.
Roy Englert, who has practiced before the Supreme Court for four decades, including in the 1980s as an attorney in the US solicitor general’s office, says Sauer has disrupted the model.
“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 said.
His tactic will work, Englert added, only if it “aligns with the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudential preferences.”
The solicitor general in Trump’s first term was Noel Francisco, much more a product of the Washington Republican establishment, working with an administration more restrained than in the second term. Francisco also faced a 5-4 conservative-liberal bench; with today’s additional right-wing vote, the majority has been moving to the right faster.
Sauer, to be sure, is not persuading the justices to go anywhere they are not already bound. The administration’s loss in the dispute over his sweeping tariffs showed the limits of the Trump administration advocacy.
But the Supreme Court’s recent evisceration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act demonstrated where the the solicitor general could guide the court. The decision in Louisiana v. Callais flowed from a decades-long drive led by Roberts. Yet it drew on arguments that Sauer’s team had crafted to subvert a key Voting Rights Act section without overruling it.
Dissenting Justice Elena Kagan recognized the influence of the solicitor general’s office, referring at one point 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” brief, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the majority, minimized the consequences of the new test for alleging discrimination in redistricting and said, “We need only update the framework …”
The Trump administration had switched the Justice Department position in the long-running Louisiana controversy, withdrawing support for a state map with two Black-majority congressional districts among the total six.
Trump, after hearing that the court invalidated that map in a decision that would help Republicans, responded, “I love it.”
CNN’s chief supreme court analyst reacts to bombshell ruling
CNN’s chief supreme court analyst reacts to bombshell ruling
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Sauer, 51, came to national prominence in 2024 as he won Trump substantial immunity from criminal prosecution. Trump had been accused of election fraud, conspiracy and other offences in connection with his protest of the election results that validly gave Joe Biden the White House in 2020.
Even before that landmark ruling in Trump v. United States, Sauer had showed his allegiance to Trump. Sauer helped lead a group of states backing a Supreme Court challenge to the outcome of the 2020 election. The justices quickly dismissed the case, Texas v. Pennsylvania.
The week after Trump regained the White House in November 2024, he announced he would nominate Sauer to be US solicitor general, the government’s top lawyer before the Supreme Court.
In that post, Sauer has continually cited the case of Trump v. United States as grounds for greater executive power in this second Trump term. That Roberts opinion for the court emphasized the president’s “conclusive and preclusive” authority.
One pending case, Trump v. Slaughter, could lead the court to greenlight Trump’s removal of independent agency officials before their terms are up. When the controversy centered on former Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter came before the justices in December, Sauer stressed in his brief that, “The President must control all exercises of executive power.”
Adapting language from the immunity case, Sauer also 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 regarding expansive presidential power. He also strategically lifted a line from Roberts as he urged the court to overturn a 1935 precedent, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, that had restricted the president’s removal authority.
“Humphrey’s Executor has become a decaying husk with bold and particularly dangerous pretensions,” Sauer asserted, using a Roberts phrase from a 2024 decision that overturned a 40-year principle of judicial deference to federal agencies.
Duncan Hosie, a legal scholar at 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 said, adding 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 offers Trump, and the high court, a distinct blend of zeal and credential.
He obtained a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship, Harvard law degree, and clerkship with the late conservative icon Justice Antonin Scalia, whom Trump has long held up as the ideal. Unlike many lawyers with that elite experience, however, Sauer left Washington. He returned home to the St. Louis area, serving as an assistant US attorney, then turning to private practice, before becoming the state solicitor general. He also began working on right-wing priorities, including against abortion rights and LGBTQ rights.
The culture-wars emphasis made him a good fit for Trump and for a high court that has rolled back reproductive rights and protections for transgender people.
In their own ways, Trump, Sauer and the Supreme Court have defied the norm. Unlike much of the last half-century, when the bench was ideologically split 5-4, the current Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative supermajority. The right-wing control 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 in the traditional gray morning coat, the gravelly voiced Sauer is all movement. He gestures briskly, his shoulders pump up and down, as he promotes the president’s legal agenda.
Trump has watched Sauer in a courtroom four times, the first three as he was representing him personally in lower courts. In November 2023, Sauer argued against a gag order in Trump’s election subversion case in the DC Circuit; then in January 2024, the first appeal for Trump in his effort to be immune from criminal 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 opportunity came last month at the Supreme Court, during the dispute over the president’s order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children born of people who lack citizenship.
Trump signed the order on January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, and it was swiftly blocked by lower court judges. It conflicts with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees birthright citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and with long-standing Supreme Court precedent.
Sauer likely understood the long-shot nature of the case, and Trump himself has predicted defeat. In a rambling Truth Social post 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 fact, many other countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Canada and Mexico, provide such automatic citizenship.)
The president in that post criticized the court for declining to publicly recognize him. Trump attended as a litigant in 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 the president’s complaints about the court, the conservative majority is more often than not aligned with him, continuing to bolster the president’s overall executive power.
And Sauer has never faced the pummeling other SGs experienced at the hands of the majority. Liberal justices have occasionally asked him to slow down, and Roberts chastised him during a January argument for interrupting a justice mid-question.
But the chief justice does not challenge Sauer the way he confronted Kagan (when she was solicitor general before President Barack Obama named her to the court) or her successor Donald Verrilli. Roberts was particularly unyielding when the subject was race, for example quizzing Verrilli on elusive voting statistics to suggest certain Voting Rights Act protections were no longer needed.
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, said he did not, Roberts said, “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 defense. That happened in the Trump v. Slaughter case that could give the president a freer hand to fire the heads of independent regulatory agencies.
“Counsel,” senior liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor began 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?”
A few beats later, conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 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.”
