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.

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

I don't think this is a situation where you can say that Congress was avoiding any mention of the tax power. It'd be one thing if Congress explicitly disavowed an exercise of the tax power. But given that it hasn't done so, it seems to me that it's - not only is it fair to read this as an exercise of the tax power, but this court has got an obligation to construe it as an exercise of the tax power if it can be upheld on that basis.

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.

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.

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

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.