Verrilli Quotes

#1. Donald Verrilli has argued 37 cases in five years on behalf of the [Barak] Obama administration. Many of them turned out to be truly landmark cases. He is the seventh-longest-serving solicitor general in American history.

Dahlia Lithwick

#2. I do think that the instant nature of the reaction now, I do think it has an effect, that people's instant reactions to things are valid and valuable. But they're not always right, and they're not always capturing the full reality.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#3. When we're not a party, we sometimes file as amicus, as friend of the court, 25, 30 times a term, sometimes more. And in each of those cases, we've got to decide what position the government's going to take. And that is the solicitor general's job to make that decision.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#4. I'm arguing for progressive positions on behalf of a progressive administration in front of a court who, before Justice [Antonin] Scalia's death, had a conservative majority that was quite conservative, frankly.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#5. It was as if the city itself was preparing for some impending catastrophe. There had always been talks of ghost and darkness here, even in his boyhood, and now that darkness seems to be seeping from the stones and timbers as much as it was descending from heavens.

K.J. Wignall

#6. Very quickly the lawyers in the Justice Department pulled together a set of recommendations about how we ought to defend the law as a constitutional matter. And it was the lawyers in the Justice Department who thought that it was important to include the tax power argument as part of it.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#7. I feel so blessed to have had the chance to do this job [ U.S. Solicitor General] in this moment in our history. It's been an incredible thing.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#8. I have a lot of faith in people.

John Lithgow

#9. The dreariest spot in all the land to Death they set apart; with scanty grace from Nature's hand, and none from that of Art.

John Greenleaf Whittier

#10. There was a huge movement that led up to [gay marriage legilization], and I played a small role in the great scheme of things. But it was really a privilege to get to do it.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#11. The thriller genre in general, it's total foreign ground for me.

Katie Aselton

#12. After a couple of years, I realized that this was actually true, that his gave me the ability to go to a different place and, hopefully, have a stronger impact.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#13. The moot court process in our office when we get ready, we - everybody, including the SG, does two moot courts for each argument. And they are phenomenal, and they predict 90 percent of the questions that I get asked, at least 90 percent.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#14. My job was always to pull a vote over from somebody who was likely to be at least at the outset disinclined to agree with me on some things or at least disinclined to agree with the policy that I was defending.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#15. My favorite television show has changed throughout the years. I used to think 'Married ... With Children' was really funny. But now that I've gotten older, it's 'The Golden Girls,' believe it or not. That shows kills me.

Blake Shelton

#16. Quite often there's a great deal of disagreement within the executive branch about what we should do. Some cases are pretty straightforward, but a lot of them aren't.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#17. Sometimes one of the justices, because they're, you know, they're brilliant lawyers themselves, can put the question in a particular way so that, even if you've prepared to talk about the topic, the question is put in such an excruciatingly difficult way that there's just no good way to handle it.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#18. In the past, presidents had been consulted about those kinds of decisions by SGs, and I thought it was the right thing to do.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#19. Brett Kavanaugh is a brilliant, brilliant judge and one of the most-distinguished conservative jurists in the country.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#20. If people can live openly and be equal, then you have to have a pretty strong reason to say they can't get married.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#21. What we once thought of as necessary and proper reasons for ostracizing and marginalizing gay people, we now understand do not justify that kind of oppression.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#22. If you've ever been in the West Wing, it's like a little rabbit warren. Everybody's crammed in there on top of each other, and you're eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the mess with people. And so you really get to know each other very well. So, I think they just weren't worried.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#23. The president [Barak Obama] had been asked some questions by George Stephanopoulos on a news show about whether it was a tax. And he had given an answer that you might read as him saying it wasn't a tax. I think what he said was, "It isn't a tax increase on all Americans."

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#24. I do think it's true that a huge amount of the oversight that the White House engages in with respect to the Executive Branch is out of fear that somebody's going to do something crazy and drive the president off a cliff.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#25. It's the spring of 2012, that the [Barak] Obama administration would be embracing the argument that the Affordable Care Act was a tax, and that was going to, itself, be a political albatross.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#26. Gay and lesbian people are equal. They deserve equal protection of the laws, and they deserve it now.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#27. I do a little bit of hand-holding on the big cases. You know, like health care, I'll call over and say, "Don't worry. We've got it under control. We have the best people working on it. We're on schedule. Stay calm." So, those kinds of things.

Donald Verrilli Jr.

#28. People have got to make their best calls in what they think about a case when they're covering it. But I do think the lesson there, and I guess stating the obvious, that oral argument can as often send a false signal as an accurate signal about where the thing is going.

Donald Verrilli Jr.