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.

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.

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.

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

I do think it's true that a huge amount of the oversight that the White House engages in with respect to the Executive Branch is out of fear that somebody's going to do something crazy and drive the president off a cliff.

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.

It's the spring of 2012, that the [Barak] Obama administration would be embracing the argument that the Affordable Care Act was a tax, and that was going to, itself, be a political albatross.