Oil pump jacks in McKenzie County in western N. D., Jan. 14, 2015. Nineteen Republican state attorneys general have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved in a dispute over climate-change lawsuits. (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File) On Dec. 10, the solicitor general filed two briefs in climate change cases, supporting a continuation of a chaotic flurry of state climate change litigation across the country. Strikingly absent from each solicitor general brief is any effort to assert the peculiar interests of the United States government. Yet, that is the solicitor general’s one job when it is asked by the U.S. Supreme Court to file a brief in a case where the United States is not a party. They had one job, and they failed to do it. This failure exposes the weakness of the Biden administration’s position supporting the climate change plaintiffs. And the absence of any effort to consider several key federal interests leaves the door wide open for a persuasive and influential amended brief from the incoming Trump administration solicitor general next January. That corrective brief can be accurately stylized as simply addressing fatal errors of omission necessitating an alternative conclusion. When the U.S. Supreme Court invites the solicitor general to “file a brief in this case expressing the views of the United States” — as the court did last June in both Alabama et al. v. California et al. and in the related petitions for certiorari in Sunoco LP v. City and County of Honolulu and Shell PLC v. City and County of Honolulu — it usually does so with the anticipation and out of an interest in understanding the peculiar interests of the sovereign in cases where the sovereign interests might be implicated. The primary issue in both cases is whether federal law should preclude […]