Despite their deep ideological divide, liberal Justice R🦂uth 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 floral gift to Ginsburg, who was his adversary on the bench but his frequent companion at the oper༒a, which both loved.
Opera houses across the U.S. have dimmed their lights to honor Ginsburg’s passing.
“Wow,” Federal Judge Jeffrey Sutton remarked upon seeing the bouquet in his boss’s chambers.
Scalia happily told Sutton he needed to take them down to “Ruth” for her birthday, Christopher Scalia, the jurist’s son, after Ginsburg’s death.
Scalia died in 2016 at age 79; Ginsburg died Friday at 87 due to metastacized pancriatic 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 five-four case of any significance where you got Justice Ginsburg’s vote.”
Scaliওa answere🌞d, “Some things are more important than votes.”
Scalia and Ginsburg’s friendship stretched back to their time on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, before each was appointed to the highest bench in the country.
After Scalia was ꦫappointed to the Supreme Court in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan, he described the hole in his🥀 professional life in leaving the Brooklyn-born Ginsburg behind.
“I have missed Rut𝔍h very much since leaving the court of appeals. She was the best of colleagues, as she is the best of friends. I wish her a hundred years,” Scalia told an audience after delivering a “roast” to mark Ginsburg’s 10th anniversary on the D.C. appellate court in the 90s, .