In 1996, just a year out of law school, I began as a law clerk on the Supreme Court, clerking for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. “The Chief,” as we called him, was one of the greatest justices ever to serve on the Court. The sixteenth person to serve as chief justice of the United States, he sat on the Court for thirty-three years.
Each of the nine justices hires law clerks, typically four per year. The clerks spend almost every waking moment with their justices, helping them read the briefs, study the case law, prepare for oral argument, and draft their opinions. For a young lawyer, there is no better opportunity to learn and understand the real inner-workings of the Court.
The Chief hired just three clerks per year rather than four. He had a staggering intellect, with a near-perfect photographic memory. He was deeply conservative, and he had spent decades trying to lead the Court away from the activist path it had set out on in the 60s and 70s.
Rehnquist became a teacher, a mentor, and a close friend. I was immensely fortunate to work for him. The Supreme Court was a world I hadn’t known before. I didn’t come from a family that had access or influence. There were no lawyers in my family, and nobody had ever gone to an Ivy League school. My dad came as a penniless immigrant from Cuba, and my mom was the first in her Irish-Italian working-class family ever to go to college. When I was in high school, the small business they had started went bankrupt. We lost our home and all our savings, and I took out large student loans and worked two jobs to make it through college and law school.
Getting the opportunity to clerk for the Chief helped launch my career before the Court. When the Chief offered me the job, my father wept (one of only two times I’ve ever seen him cry). I was being given the opportunity to see the Court from the inside, to get to know the justices personally, to learn and to see how they decide the cases before them. Over the next year, I worked sixteen-hour days, typically from 9:00 a.m. till 1:00 a.m., broken up only by basketball games three times a week with fellow clerks, police officers, and staff at the Court. There’s actually a basketball court above the courtroom where the Court sits, immediately atop the twenty-four carat gold–gilded ceiling of the courtroom. The roof is low, and you have to develop a low-arching jump-shot to avoid being blocked by the ceiling. They call it “the highest court in the land.”
After my clerkship, I went into private practice, to Cooper & Carvin, a small six-person litigation firm in D.C. specializing in constitutional and Supreme Court advocacy. It was founded by two senior lawyers from the Reagan Department of Justice, Chuck Cooper and Mike Carvin. Both are extraordinary lawyers; together they taught me how to practice law. Mike is a brilliant litigator who would go on to play a major role in helping us win Bush v. Gore.
Chuck is also a former Rehnquist clerk, and he’s an incredible strategist, a beautiful and elegant writer, and a very dear friend. During the presidential campaign, Chuck took a leave of absence from his firm to come to Houston full-time and help lead the campaign. He was an integral part of my debate-prep team, and had I won the election, he would have been my nominee for attorney general.
I left Cooper & Carvin in 1999 to join the George W. Bush presidential campaign, working as a young policy staffer in Austin. On the campaign, I met my wife, Heidi, my best friend and the love of my life.
From there, I joined the Bush administration, as an associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice and then as the head of policy at the Federal Trade Commission.
And then, in 2003, I was appointed the solicitor general of Texas, the chief appellate lawyer for the State of Texas. My boss was Greg Abbott, then the Texas attorney general and a close friend. I served in that role for five and a half years, litigating major constitutional issues before the state and federal courts. Then, I returned to private practice, for the next five years leading the Supreme Court practice at Morgan Lewis, one of the largest law firms in the country.
Over those ten years, I authored over eighty U.S. Supreme Court briefs and argued before the high court nine times, more than any other lawyer in Texas and more than any other member of Congress. My job was to win—to try to get five justices to agree and to rule for my client.
And, in case after case, we won major victories. This book tells you the inside story of those constitutional battles—most of which were decided by just a single vote.
We start with Van Orden v. Perry, a landmark religious liberty case, where the Court upheld as constitutional the public display of a Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds. The Bill of Rights begins by protecting our religious liberty, and it is a cornerstone of the rights we hold dear. Van Orden was decided by a 5–4 vote, and every year religious liberty challenges are among the most contentious issues before the Court.
After that, we turn to school choice, which I believe to be the most pressing civil rights issue in the nation. Millions of children are trapped in schools that deny them access to a quality education. For a child’s hope in life to be dictated by his or her race, ethnicity, wealth, or zip code makes a mockery of equal protection. In Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Court, 5–4, upheld Ohio’s school choice program, allowing scholarships for low-income kids to give them a much better chance at the American dream.
From there, we move to Heller v. District of Columbia, another case I helped litigate, which
