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.

Watch what happens on Twitter. One thing leads to another very quickly. And in an ironic sense, even though it's such a democratic form of communication, there's a funny way in which it leads to a hardening of a conventional wisdom much more quickly than might happen if you were reflecting on it a little more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One thing I've experienced and I feel really grateful for now that I'm on my way out is that I felt that the justices gave that back to me. I really did. You know, of course, you can have some sharp exchanges. That's the nature of the thing, and that's fine. But really in the main I felt like the tone from them was, "Yeah. We may not agree with you, but we're going to have a discussion about this." And it did.