D John Sauer's rise as US solicitor general has become one of the clearest signs of how Donald Trump's legal team is seeking to reshape the Supreme Court, with the Trump administration now pressing a far more assertive view of executive power in Washington and beyond. Sauer is the lawyer carrying some of the administration's most consequential arguments before the justices, from tariffs to voting rights and immigration, and he is doing so in a way that has drawn both admiration from conservatives and unease from his critics.
The news came after Sauer, once best known as Trump's personal lawyer, moved into the solicitor general's office and took up disputes that go to the heart of how much power a president can claim over federal agencies, border policy and the electoral map. Traditionally, the solicitor general has been treated as a restrained, almost priestly figure in American appellate law, the so-called 'Tenth Justice' whose authority rests as much on credibility as on force. Sauer has not so much broken that mould as bent it until it squeaks.
