Adding executive input increases certainty.

Research discussed in the sections above highlights two important reasons for why we theorize the Court should CVSG to gain more information about executive preferences. First, justices pursue preferences, but they do so in a strategic manner. A means to establish policy attainments is to ensure the implementer of policy, the president, will enforce the Court’s decision. Understanding where the president stands allows the Court to make more calculated decisions about where in the policy space its ruling can successfully land. In publicly charged policy areas, the Court may be seeking a signal of executive support (such as in the Brown cases).2 Alternatively, the brief could cue the Court to outcomes that may bring potential sanctions. Because the Court wishes to see its policy implemented, and because the Court depends on institutional legitimacy, it wants to know of the possibility of threats to these goals.3

Second, and more simply, the justices care about making good policy. Indeed, Hausegger and Baum (1999, 182) demonstrate that the Court will ask Congress to review the legal sphere surrounding decisions in order to create good policy “as they see it.” Since the executive branch is responsible for implementation of policy, the Court may want to know about possible problems of implementation. The actors in the executive branch have the (greater) requisite expertise on implementation. Because we argue that the SOTU proxies the executive agenda, and this agenda often includes policy plans, an area receiving less attention may indicate one with less public information about the impacts of changing policy. Thus, in these areas, the Court may wish to CVSG to supplement its information.