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

I think what happened is that everybody's impressions got formed in those first few minutes. And I felt like, by the latter part of it, I kind of clawed my way back into the discussion. But everybody's impressions were set at the beginning. And wholly apart from me and whether I was good or bad, you know, there were a lot of hostile questions.

The cases involving the question of whether U.S. courts should be open to claims of international human rights violations brought by foreign persons against foreign government officials. And the State Department on the one side has got a very consistent and powerful view that U.S. courts should be open to those claims because there needs to be a place in the world where they can be brought. And those human rights norms ought to be real and enforceable, and we ought to be a beacon to the world.

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.

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.

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.