My thoughts, recommendations, and predictions as a 70-year old Libertarian-Conservative-Patriot  

• President Donald Trump should immediately resign. He has become a disgrace and is unfit to be Commander and Chief. His “rallying speech” was inappropriate and inciteful. His call for peace was tepid. Had I been advising the President, I would have said his rally speech should have focused on his achievements. He should have told the supporters I won’t concede; however, I will abide by the Constitution and the political process. And I need your support because I will return to run for President in four years.

• President Trump is his own worst enemy and creates his crises. I voted for him twice. I respect a man who gives me his word and then fulfills it. And, no, I wouldn’t say I liked Trump personally. He is not a Southern gentleman, and that is how I was raised. He is rude, crude, aggressive, argumentative, and a street brawler. Hell, he’s from New York City. I never liked NYC.

• Unlike President Obama and Clinton, I would not want to share a beer (Diet Coke) with him. However, I agreed with many of his policies and commend him for his achievements. Sadly, few people will remember those achievements in a few weeks, if they ever knew them.

• The “mob” members who broke into the U.S. Congress must be tracked down and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The behavior was criminal, despicable, and deplorable. Yes, this hand full of people is deplorable.  A thorough investigation of this situation and those involved is critical, and justice is essential. There is no place for this behavior amongst those of us who believe in law and order. The Conservative Right has called for the arrest and prosecution of other mobs and thugs who stepped outside the boundaries of peaceful assembly. Action to find and arrest these people is critical. Let me be clear; each of the #Antifa and #BLM perps of criminal behavior also must be found, arrested, and prosecuted.

• Responsible officials must immediately and thoroughly investigate the person who shot the woman veteran. Officials must be open and transparent throughout the investigation. The officials must provide their findings to the public as soon as possible. And, if the shooting was justified, their openness and transparency will have been of value. If the perpetrator is found not to be justified in the act, he/she must be prosecuted.

• Just as we saw with the #BLM and #Antifa demonstrations and occupations in Seattle, Louisville, Kenosha, Minneapolis, and Portland throughout the year, a small band of ill-intentioned people can overtake thousands of people who have every right to protest peacefully. Find them and prosecute them.

• People as old as I am (70 plus) and as young as our grandchildren assembled yesterday to express their “feelings” about the Presidential election, which many believe was fraudulent. They did not come as far away as California and Oregon to break into and vandalize Congress and threaten the elected officials and their staff. However, as we have seen for a year, it only takes a few thugs to get the train off the track. Yet, we must protect all Constitutional civil liberties.

• It is assumable that a high percentage of the 74 million people that voted for Trump seriously question the efficacy of the current voting systems throughout the United States. A thorough investigation of the alleged fraudulent behavior, violations of state constitutions, and the state legislative bodies’ exclusion to change laws are essential. States that have such issues must engage the legislative bodies of those states to fix the problem.  Ohio and Florida election models are worthy of review. If elected officials or their employees are discovered to have engaged in any of this alleged behavior, they must be prosecuted.  

• The election is over. Joe Biden is president-elect. The rhetoric and conspiracies that have circulated about how Trump and his lawyers were going to reverse the election were just that. Further speculations and b.s. is a waste of everyone’s time. Trump will not be President in 13-days. I recognize the possibility of unity when one side has referred to the other as deplorables, rubes, and Walmart shoppers are bleak. Yet, all of us have a responsibility to move into a realm of seeking collaborative, informed consent in which we can debate merits, pros and cons, and alternative solutions to our Nation’s problems.

• Personality politics, character assassinations, political wheeling and dealing, opposition spying, federal law enforcement’s politicization, and a return to the “Deep State” government way of doing business prevails. The bellicose and pugnacious politicking that Trump brought into an already theater of absurd will continue. 

• However, I survived the Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton- Gore, Bush-Cheney, Obama-Biden administrations, and my wife and I will survive one way or another the Biden-Harris four years.  

• And meanwhile, if we follow Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s inspiration, maybe, we will find both sides better educated, positioned, and prepared to take on the next election with improved integrity. Perception is reality in my business. The current perception is not good. The next election requires leaders that understand the importance of fighting for what they care for. These leaders must lead others to join, not fight against one another, or oppose one another only on personality. We must return to debating policy. Both sides of the political pancake need a new recipe. To achieve such a recipe requires debate, deliberation, dialogue, and discussion.

• And why did I say that RBG “got it right”? Justice Ginsburg, on this 2021 calendar I ordered for Christmas, advises us to “Fight for the things you care about. But do it in a way that will lead others to join you.”

I don’t believe she implored this wisdom for a singular cause, situation, or purpose. Nor do I think her counsel applies to one side only of the political pancake. You see, I believe her advice is universal. It is applicable for everyone who has a cause they believe is worth fighting for. I commend and admire her for that inspiration.

I may be a Libertarian-Conservative, and you define your politics elsewhere,  that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends and remain family. I believe we can agree to disagree and then have cigars while sipping a fine Scotch or Bourbon. Much of the inspiration and debate on structuring, deploying, and using our Model of Collaborative Informed Consent came from such sipping sessions and more than a smidgen of debate.  And, if ever our Nation needed to use Collaborative Informed Consent, it would be now!

Frankly, I admired the special relationship that  Justice Ginsburg and Justice Scalia shared. I hope to model it someday.

WASHINGTON – Long before they became federal appeals court judges, Supreme Court justices, travel companions, and New Year’s Eve celebrants together, Ruth Bader Ginsburg watched Antonin Scalia speak to the American Bar Association.

As she would for decades to come, Ginsburg disagreed with Scalia’s thesis. But, she recalled in 2014, “he said it in an absolutely captivating way.”

Thus did the two ideological opposites attract for what became from that day on a close friendship – one their families, friends and colleagues recalled affectionately after Scalia’s death at a Texas ranch in 2016 and again following Ginsburg’s death Friday on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. 

“What’s not to like?” Scalia said of Ginsburg at that joint appearance six years ago. “Except her views on the law.”  

“We agree on a whole lot of stuff,” he added. “Ruth is really bad only on the knee-jerk stuff.”

In an era of increasingly bitter partisan enmity, the odd coupling of Ginsburg – petite, serious, seemingly shy – and Scalia – rotund, garrulous, overtly opinionated – may be viewed as an anachronism. But many cited it over the weekend as a signal of hope.

One of those was Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, who recalled in a Washington Post column the many New Year’s Eve dinners when “Nino” and Maureen Scalia would join Ruth and Martin Ginsburg at their Watergate apartment. The dinners often featured venison or boar that Scalia hunted and Ginsburg’s husband, a renowned tax attorney who died in 2010, had expertly prepared.

“They were both New Yorkers, close in age, and liked a lot of the same things: the law, teaching, travel, music and a meal with family and friends,” Eugene Scalia wrote. “They had a bond, I think, in that they both grew up as outsiders – to different degrees – to the elites who had ruled the country: she as a Jew and woman, he as a Catholic and Italian American.”

Their shared love of opera was on display in 1994, shortly after Ginsburg (a Bill Clinton nominee) joined Scalia (a Ronald Reagan nominee) on the Supreme Court. They appeared together as extras in the Washington National Opera’s opening night production of Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. 

Years later, they became the subjects of “Scalia/Ginsburg,” Derrick Wang’s 2014 comic opera inspired by their legal opinions. 

“It opens with Scalia’s rage aria,” Ginsburg recalled a few years ago. “He sings, ‘The justices are blind, how can they possibly spout this? The Constitution says absolutely nothing about this!'” To which she responded that the Constitution, like society, “can evolve.”

The two justices appeared together many times over the years. When tickets went on sale in 2015 for a joint appearance at George Washington University, the first 350 tickets were scooped up in less than three hours. 

Those occasions exhibited the many traits they had in common. They were fellow New Yorkers, Ginsburg having grown up in Brooklyn, Scalia in Queens. They were fellow academics, Scalia having taught at the University of Virginia and University of Chicago law schools, Ginsburg at Rutgers and Columbia.

Their bond was cemented at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the most common stepping-stone to the Supreme Court. Ginsburg served there from 1980-93, Scalia from 1982-86.

“From our years together at the D.C. Circuit, we were best buddies,” Ginsburg said following her colleague’s death.

At Scalia’s memorial service in 2016, Ginsburg recounted the story of how, when she was writing the high court’s majority opinion striking down the Virginia Military Institute’s ban on admitting women, Scalia showed her his unfinished dissent.

“It was a zinger,” filled with “disdainful footnotes,” she said. But “I was glad to have the extra days to adjust the court’s opinion. My final draft was much improved, thanks to Justice Scalia’s searing criticism.”

Ginsburg’s opinions, dissents:From VMI to Voting Rights Act

To sum up their friendship, she quoted Scalia: “I attack ideas. I don’t attack people. Some very good people have some very bad ideas.”

Then later that year, in her memoir “My Own Words,” she summed it up her own way:

“How blessed I was,” she wrote, “to have a working colleague and dear friend of such captivating brilliance, high spirits and quick wit.” (USA Today 20 September 2020)

Justices Ginsburg and Scalia understood that we, as citizens in this Republic, can and will have differences of opinions at the most basic level. Yet, they and their families were life-long friends.

I suggest, as friends, they could see both sides of the pancake, argue and debate the ingredients,  and agree to disagree on what buttery syrup might be needed to make it more palatable? And I guess …

“That’s all I have to say about that.” – Forrest Gump

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