Elephant rides & roses with Scalia
Despite their deep ideological divide, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her conservative court bestie, Antonin Scalia, had been such good pals that he once presented her with a bouquet of two dozen red roses.
Scalia took some ribbing for the romantic gift to Ginsburg, who was his adversary on the bench but his frequent companion at the opera, which both loved. Opera houses across the US have dimmed their lights to honor Ginsburg’s passing.
“Wow,” federal Judge Jeffrey Sutton, then a law clerk for the Supreme Court, remarked upon seeing the bouquet in Scalia’s chambers.
Scalia happily told Sutton that he needed to take them down to “Ruth” for her birthday, Christopher Scalia, the jurist’s son, recalled in a poignant Twitter post after Ginsburg’s death.
Antonin Scalia died in 2016 at age 79; Ginsburg died on Friday at 87 due to metastatic pancreatic cancer.
“I doubt I have given a total of 24 roses to my wife in almost 30 years of marriage,” Sutton told Scalia, according to the son’s tweet.
“You ought to try it sometime,” Scalia replied.
Sutton pushed back, “So what have all these roses done for you? Name one 5-4 case of any significance where you got Justice Ginsburg’s vote.”
Scalia answered, “Some things are more important than votes.”
Scalia and Ginsburg’s friendship stretched back to their time on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
After Scalia was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan, he described feeling a hole in his professional life after leaving Ginsburg behind.
“I have missed Ruth very much since leaving the court of appeals. She was the best of colleagues, as she is the best of friends,” Scalia told an audience after delivering a “roast” to mark Ginsburg’s 10th anniversary on the DC appellate court in the ’90s, according to his son’s tweet.
“I wish her a hundred years.”