Michael Carvin, the attorney arguing on behalf of the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell case, said this challenge is different because the argument against the law centers on a statute that was “written by white women and minorities.”
Carvin’s comments were published in a Wall Street Journal profile of him on Tuesday, a day before oral arguments began in the King v. Burwell lawsuit.
Carvin argued that the difference between this lawsuit and the one in 2012 is that unlike the 2012 challenge, the argument on Wednesday is on “a statute that was written three years ago, not by dead white men but by living white women and minorities.”
“It hasn’t had time to ‘grow’ or ‘evolve,'” Carvin added, a jab that mocks terms liberals have used for constitutional doctrines that conservatives have argued aren’t supported by the Constitution.
Carvin actually cited Atticus Finch of “To Kill A Mocking Bird” as an inspiration for his fight to overturn the law, according to the Journal profile. Finch was the lawyer who defended a black man who was charged with raping a white woman.
In an interview with TPM in September 2014, Carvin repeatedly suggested that it didn’t matter what Obama-appointed judges thought of Obamacare.
“I don’t know that four justices, who are needed to [take the case] here, are going to give much of a damn about what a bunch of Obama appointees on the D.C. Circuit think,” Carvin said.
In the same interview, he added that he didn’t expect to lose Republican-appointed judges in arguing against Obamacare.
“There’s plenty of cases where [Supreme Court justices] take important issues even if there’s no circuit split — like the gay marriage cases, they might take those,” Carvin said. “If you’ve gone through that process and you don’t really care what [the Obama-appointed judges] think — because I’m not going to lose any Republican-appointed judges’ votes on the en banc — then I think the calculus would be, well let’s take it now and get it resolved.”
