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.

I do think that the instant nature of the reaction now, I do think it has an effect, that people's instant reactions to things are valid and valuable. But they're not always right, and they're not always capturing the full reality.

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.

I had a great deal of independence from the president and the White House during the entirety of my five years. And I'm not sure exactly what that is, but our friend, Walter Dellinger, has a theory about it, and I think he's probably right. And the theory starts with the fact that I worked in the White House for a year and a half before coming over to the position of SG. And because of that, when I was nominated, there was some chatter out there that, "Oh. They're putting a political hack in. This has never happened before."

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.

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.

The fact that you have a policy of such consequence directly affecting millions of people and you have a legal question of great consequence about the scope of the president's authority to act in implementing the immigration laws in this way and you have a one-line decision from the court affirming by an equally-divided court, it's an inevitable consequence of where we are.