Policy Congruence between the President and the Solicitor General

Buyer Beware? Presidential Success through Supreme Court Appointments

“…As already noted, the previous attempts to gauge policy preferences empirically focused on the President's political party (Rohde and Spaeth 1976) and policy statements (Gates and Cohen 1989;Heck and Shull 1982;Meinhold and Shull 1998). We include these measures in Table 1 for comparison.…”

“…This, however, is a blunt measure that cannot measure within-party variation. Thus, Heck and Shull (1982) use content analysis of presidential statements to define presidential preferences (see also Gates and Cohen 1989;Meinhold and Shull 1998). While a substantial improvement over party affiliation, this method assumes Presidents always mean what they say, a tenuous assumption to make about any political actor.…”

The Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Strategies in the Supreme Court

“…Unlike the legal perspective of the SG, the political view posits the SG as an agent of the president seeking to influence the Court to adopt policies favorable to his administration's interests, that is, policies that maximize the president's political goals (e.g., Meinhold & Shull, 1998;Norman-Major, 1994;Salokar, 1992;Zorn, 2002). The reality that the SG is very much an agent of the president is perhaps most evident in the SG's selection process.…”

“…For example, in interviews with , former SGs spoke to the importance of these agenda cases: For Rex Lee, SG under Reagan, these cases involved obscenity, religion, and abortion; for Archibald Cox, SG under Kennedy, agenda cases included issues dealing with civil rights and reapportionment; for SGs Stanley Reed and Robert Jackson, who served under Roosevelt, these cases covered litigation related to the New Deal. By filing amicus briefs in these agenda cases, SGs can promote the president's agenda through position taking (Mayhew, 1974), and should their positions prevail on the merits, this enables presidents to influence public policy long after they leave the White House by creating favorable precedents (Meinhold & Shull, 1998;Wasby, 1995). Former Solicitor General Rex Lee unequivocally denotes the attractiveness of cases that are congruent with the president's political agenda in observing, One of the purposes of the solicitor general is to represent his client, the president of the United States.…”

“…Given this, it is surprising that there has been little accumulated knowledge regarding the SG's decision to participate as amicus (cf. Meinhold & Shull, 1998;Puro, 1971;Salokar, 1992). Moreover, of the research that does exist, none has attempted to link the SG's decision to file an amicus brief to the SG's subsequent success on the merits.…”