Solicitor General Noel Francisco resigns after tumultuous years representing Trump at Supreme Court

WASHINGTON – Some of the nation's smartest and savviest lawyers have represented the federal government at the Supreme Court over the past 150 years. But Noel Francisco has had perhaps the most unique head client: Donald Trump.

Francisco, 50, who announced Wednesday that he will leave the post next month, spent three years as solicitor general of the United States during a time of non-stop legal tumult.

Throughout Trump's presidency, administration policies on immigration, health care and other hot-button issues were challenged repeatedly by states and civil rights groups. Lower court judges blocked many of those policies, often on a nationwide basis.

Those skirmishes, many of them fought over the president's efforts to reduce the flow of immigrants into the U.S., became the central legacy of Francisco's tenure. His legal strategy: If at first you don't succeed, head to the Supreme Court.

"In overseeing federal litigation, Solicitor General Francisco made strategic use of emergency motions to defend important federal programs against improper nationwide injunctions," the Justice Department announcement of his departure said. "As a result of these successes, some lower courts have begun to curb the erroneous use of nationwide injunctions."

Stephen Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who has cataloged Francisco's won-lost record before a high court that leans conservative, put it another way.

"The solicitor general’s office has had an unprecedented degree of success in mitigating the effects of these lower court rulings," Vladeck said, but at the risk of politicizing the job.

"We've seen solicitors general increasingly become more partisan in recent years," he said, citing the "potential long-term damage to any appearance of independence that the office might previously have had."

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From the early days of his battle to block travelers from several majority-Muslim nations, Trump lost most of his lower-court battles. Federal district and circuit courts frequently stopped his efforts to build a border wall, block asylum-seekers and penalize municipal governments seen as harboring illegal immigrants.

More than half the time, Francisco and the elite group of attorneys who represent the federal government before the Supreme Court were successful in getting the justices to stop those lower court orders on an emergency basis – an extraordinary rate of success.

"He has been a principled and persuasive advocate on issues ranging from the separation of powers to religious liberty to vigorous enforcement of federal immigration law," Attorney General William Barr said in a statement.

Francisco was the point man at the high court for Trump's agenda, arguing 17 cases personally, including most of the major ones. Those included the travel ban, which he ultimately won; the effort to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, which he lost; and the effort to end the DACA program for young, undocumented immigrants, which remains pending.

"This is not a so-called Muslim ban," Francisco, who is of Filipino heritage, argued in court. "If it were, it would be the most ineffective Muslim ban that one could possibly imagine."

When it came to the DACA program, relied upon by nearly 700,000 people brought illegally to the United States as children, Francisco was more willing to take the heat. "We own this," he told the justices.

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In his resignation letter to the president, Francisco highlighted court victories on religious liberty, enforcing immigration laws, and safeguarding executive branch powers under the Constitution.

"More generally, I believe we have furthered the principle of limited constitutional government," Francisco said. "Towards that end, your judicial appointments – including the appointment of two Supreme Court justices and almost 200 federal appellate and district court judges – will redound to the benefit of the nation for many years to come."

Francisco represented the administration in several cases affecting the LGBTQ community. He argued that religious objectors should not have to provide goods and services to gay weddings, that the armed forces should be able to refuse transgender troops, and most recently that a federal employment discrimination law does not protect the LGBTQ community. The Supreme Court ruled Monday that it does in a landmark decision.

The nation's 48th solicitor general and the first Asian American to serve in the job, Francisco clerked for Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia before rising to become a partner at the international law firm Jones Day, a breeding ground for several top Trump administration officials. He previously worked at the Justice Department in the administration of George W. Bush.

In private practice, he argued and won three high-profile cases before the Supreme Court. He represented former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell, whose corruption conviction was unanimously overturned.

He represented religious non-profit organizations fighting a government mandate to provide insurance coverage for contraceptives, a fight that is ongoing.

And he represented a Washington state company that won a unanimous decision against President Barack Obama's effort to make "recess" appointments to a government agency without Senate confirmation.

Francisco is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, as is Jeffrey Wall, the principal deputy solicitor general who is likely to fill the top job at least temporarily. Wall, a former partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, once clerked for Associate Justice Clarence Thomas.

Among the luminaries to have held the solicitor general's job were President William Howard Taft; Supreme Court justices Robert Jackson, Thurgood Marshall and Elena Kagan; Archibald Cox, who served as Watergate special prosecutor during Richard Nixon's presidency; Robert Bork, who fired Cox in the 1973 "Saturday Night Massacre" and whose Supreme Court nomination was defeated in 1987; and Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose probe nearly brought down President Bill Clinton.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump's top Supreme Court lawyer, Noel Francisco, steps down