Solicitor general brings voice of reason to health care case

WASHINGTON -- When the new health care law comes to the Supreme Court for a crucial test next month, the voice defending it will be a new one.

Donald Verrilli, who is less than a year into his post as U.S. solicitor general, did not argue the case in lower courts. And unlike officials who have been public boosters of President Obama's initiatives, Verrilli has worked mostly behind the scenes.

"I settled in Washington some 30 years ago on the theory that I would end up at the Justice Department," says Verrilli, 54, a New York native who instead stayed with a large firm, becoming an expert in telecommunications law. He also has represented, on a pro bono basis, death row prisoners.

"I ended up being in my 50s," he said in an interview, without having gone into the government. When Barack Obama became president in 2009, "I took the attitude, if they wanted me to sweep the floors at the Justice Department, I would be happy to do that."

The nation was facing enormous challenges, the economy was in a free fall," he recounted in his Justice office, dominated by a portrait of Thurgood Marshall, a former solicitor general who became the nation's first African-American justice. "If ever there was a time for public service, this was it."

A mellow approach

The tall, mustachioed Verrilli obtained prominent spots at the Justice Department and White House. In June 2011, President Obama appointed him the nation's top lawyer before the Supreme Court. He was approved by the Senate on a vote of 72-16.

Verrilli's style is modest and non-ideological. He also has shown a willingness to concede some points to the justices as he holds fast to a broader principle on which he wants to prevail. That style could defuse some tension when the court takes up its most politically charged case in more than a decade: The health care challenge will be argued over three days, March 26-28.

A veteran of 12 high-court arguments before becoming solicitor general, Verrilli has tamped down some of the passion he showed through the years, arguing on behalf of condemned prisoners, or in the 2005 milestone MGM Studios v. Grokster case, when he successfully represented the recording industry against services allowing people to freely download movies and music.

"In the past, on behalf of clients, he could be quite intense," says Paul Smith, a colleague of Verrilli's from private practice. "I think he's made a conscious choice, that that's not the tone the solicitor general should take."

Verrilli, a Democrat who worked on Bill Clinton's and Obama's transition teams, draws praise across the political spectrum for his approach as an advocate.

"He is a brilliant, highly effective lawyer," says Ken Starr, who was U.S. solicitor general under Republican George H.W. Bush and the independent counsel in the scandal involving President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. "He is the voice of sweet reason from the podium."

When Verrilli steps up to the microphone to defend the Affordable Care Act, says Starr, now president of Baylor University, "He will have the sense of the weight of the world on his shoulders."

Case speaks for itself

Verrilli declines to talk about the health care case, leaving the government's argument to its public filings.