I am going to break an internal rule, and feel somewhat sorry for an Obama appointee. Yes, I know that it’s the man’s own fault for working for this administration; I also know that anybody who would be a top-level Obama administration official would waste no sympathy on me. But judging from this report, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli is apparently on a smooth glide path to losing in whole or in part the Supreme Court case over Arizona’s new immigration law. Apparently he’s not even convincing Justice Sotomayor; and that takes skill, in this administration*.
So why am I feeling sorry for the guy? Well, it’s not because Verrilli’s problem is that, as Ed Morrissey notes, he’s stuck using stupid arguments concocted for political purposes by an administration whose core competency is incompetence. That, again, is part for the course. No, why I feel sorry for Verrilli is because I am morally certain that if he loses both the Obamacare and immigration cases he will be blamed by everybody on the Left, because that’s much easier than dealing with, say, objective reality. And that will be sole blame: nobody else will have to take the fall. Progressives and liberals will tell themselves for the next two generations that they could have gotten what they wanted, only Verrilli failed them in the clutch. His name will be mud.
Continue reading #rsrh Solicitor General Donald Verrilli being fitted for his scapegoat suit.