Experts have laid bare President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign to get the Supreme Court to do his bidding.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s office is “aggressively” pushing the high court to take on cases at an unprecedented rate, a veteran attorney who leads the Supreme Court practice at Arnold & Porter tells CNN.
“A mechanism once used sparingly is now being deployed with some regularity,” attorney John Elwood told the network.
Specifically, Elwood says Sauer has already pushed SCOTUS to act on seven briefs filed by the Trump administration, including two in emergency cases and others that align with the White House’s culture war agenda.
CNN notes that the current administration “has butt into at least five cases without invitation, most recently a potentially significant appeal involving religious preschools.” Legal experts say that such uninvited pressure from an administration is unusual.
That number of requests in a single year represents more intervention than past administrations exercised in their entire term. CNN reports that the Biden administration did not file any similar briefs in merits cases. The Clinton administration filed just five cases across eight years in office, according to SCOTUSblog. Trump’s first term saw only two such briefs.
Steve Vladeck, a CNN legal analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, suggested that the White House has turned the solicitor general’s office into a MAGA lobbying firm.
“It’s using the solicitor general’s unique position as a way to push not just the policy and political agenda of the current president, but the broader ideological agenda of the Republican Party,” he told CNN.
While past administrations have occasionally used the office to recommend cases to the high court, it has never been to the extent that the 51-year-old Sauer, who formerly represented Trump in his “presidential immunity” case, has.
The position, the fourth-highest in the Justice Department, has historically been viewed as a bridge between the White House and SCOTUS, with the office responsible for serving both entities—not pushing the priorities of one onto the other exclusively, CNN reports.
The DOJ declined to comment for this story.
Trump has enjoyed a 6-3 conservative majority on the court, including three of his own appointees, during his second term. The court backed the administration about 80 percent of the time on its emergency docket last year, reports AlterNet, but has also dealt Trump embarrassing losses, such as siding with California Gov. Gavin Newsom on his Democrat-friendly congressional maps for the state.
Still, Attorney General Pam Bondi has bragged that SCOTUS has overwhelmingly sided with the White House and Justice Department this term.
“We’ve obtained 24 favorable rulings at the US Supreme Court,” she said during her off-the-rails testimony to the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. “Even more to come.”
