Dressed in a shirt, tie and gym shorts, Stephen Colbert stretched next to a 5-foot-1 Supreme Court justice who, in her 80s, could still do push-ups and planks. Before the famous RBG workout began, he started blasting the Jock Jams classic, "Gonna Make You Sweat" from his CD player.
As Colbert danced like a groomsman on his fourth drink, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg calmly told him, "I would never never exercise to that noise. Shut it off."
Of all the moments in that comedy segment, that was the most memorable. I could not figure out why until now.
For the past few days, my social media feed has been a river of tributes to the late justice. She deserves nothing less. Without women, the legal profession had a glaring shortage of intellect and wisdom. Ginsburg changed that.
Yet her legacy matters for another reason we often forget.
In 2008, Leslie Stahl hosted a 60 Minutes episode about the late Justice Antonin Scalia. At one point, she politely confronted Scalia about the often combative tone of his written dissents. Scalia made no apology: "I attack ideas, I don't attack people, and some very good people have some very bad ideas."
To Scalia, Ginsburg was one of those people. He was a conservative who believed in originalism; she was a liberal who believed in a living Constitution. He held nothing back in his prose, sometimes calling her opinions "absurd" and "self-righteous." But when Stahl asked Ginsburg if she took this personally, Ginsburg smiled and said, "No, I take it as a challenge: How am I going to answer this in a way that is a real put-down?"
This is what two healthy intellectual self-esteems look like. As best friends, Ginsburg and Scalia knew what many of us forget: One can battle a belief and befriend the believer.
