The United States is bitterly divided culturally and politically. Our constant state of rancor may be among a few observations all can see and hope to end. As Russian troops murder children and commit other war crimes, it may be an opportunity for people in the United States to see their similarities and their common commitment to freedom and peace as something more important than the internal squabbles that separate families, friends, neighbors, and communities. Democratic Colorado Attorney Gen. Phil Weiser and Colorado Springs City Councilman Wayne Williams – the former Republican secretary of state – hope our society can heal and improve with more tolerance of diverse points of view. They believe two people can see the same thing differently with seeing the truth. Think of that old drawing seen as an old woman or a young woman by two individuals seeing it at the same place and time. Toward their vision of civility, Weiser and Williams head the Ginsburg-Scalia project. It’s named after deceased Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. The two were famously good friends and collaborators. Weiser and Williams spoke with us this month about their project.

Weiser: I am currently head of this group formerly known as the Conference of Western Attorneys General, now known as the Attorney General Alliance. John Suthers (Colorado Springs mayor and former attorney general) and Cynthia Coffman (former attorney general) before me had both been in a similar role. As a chair, you get to pick your signature initiative. Mine is what we’re calling the Ginsburg-Scalia Initiative. Others call it the Scalia-Ginsburg Initiative. Either way, the idea is to promote respectful engagement and listening and learning as part of what our legal and political culture should be with the goal of advancing collaborative problem-solving.

Gazette: You clerked for Justice Ginsburg and knew her well, so I suspect you know a lot about how those two differed on a lot of key legal opinions and world views. Yet they seemed to be great friends who could always work together constructively and cordially.

Weiser: She and I had great respect and fondness for Scalia. I hosted him when I was the dean of the (University of Colorado) Law School for a visit. And I know personally that he and Ginsburg believed deeply in the value of civil dialogue. Take, for example, the VMI case, which was whether the Virginia Military Institute should enroll women, or could they exclude them consistent with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment? Justice Scalia dissented in that case. Ginsburg wrote the majority opinion. Justice Scalia gave her an early version of his dissent. She said, “it ruined my weekend,” but it helped her write a better opinion. She believed in that dialogue, starting with respect and the importance of friendship. They each believed you can be friends with somebody who sees things differently from you and you approach those relationships with a learning mindset. They understood that people who see things differently are seeing something you are not seeing. And there’s a virtue in intellectual humility to knowing what you don’t know and recognizing you don’t know or see or live everyone’s experience. I’m seeing a lot of signs in our legal and political culture of rising demonization, rising extreme political polarization. And I believe that is a threat to the rule of law in our democratic republic.

We had a conference in Colorado Springs last summer, and one recently up in the mountains. Wayne Williams was my guest at the last one. Justice Scalia’s son (Eugene) was there, along with Arthur Brooks, who has written a book called “Love Your Enemies,” which is very much on point.

Gazette: So, you speak of conferences. What more will you do to put this into action.

Weiser:  Wayne (Williams) and I are going to do something called The Unified Colorado Challenge in April that will have members of the public paired with another person from a different background. We could have a farmer from Akron with a steelworker from Pueblo, or you could have someone working in a coffee shop in Grand Junction, working with a college professor in Durango. They’ll have conversations about a set of public policy issues with the norms that I outlined earlier. This has been done in other states very successfully, and Wayne and I are the co-sponsors.

Gazette: Why Phil Weiser and Wayne Williams? How did this partnership come about?

Williams: I get frustrated when I read or hear or see reports of families that won’t get together for Thanksgiving because they’re voting for somebody different. And that’s a microcosm. What’s affecting families is also affecting the political dialogue. Phil and I got to know each other during the 2018 campaign. We happen to be in very different parties and have very different views on multiple issues. We represent part of the Ginsburg-Scalia model, which is these were two people who represented very opposite sides of Supreme Court jurisprudence, but individuals who worked together and were very close personal friends.

Gazette: They probably built on that friendship to learn from each other, right?

Williams: Right. So, when Phil (Weiser) reached out to me we wanted as part of the unified challenge a Democrat and a Republican to say, yes, this is something coming from both sides. We need, as a civil society, the ability to talk to each other. Even when Phil is wrong, he will listen to me.

Gazette: Yes, he has always listened to our editorial board and we greatly appreciate that.

Williams: And when I am wrong, I try to listen to Phil (Weiser). That dialogue needs to take place if we are going to exist as a democratic republic going forward.

Weiser: It’s really important. Wayne (Williams) has a deep commitment and respect for the rule of law as the foundation of our democratic republic. I am also committed to the rule of law and the concept of a democratic republic. That’s 90% of what matters. We can argue about the other 10%, but we’ve got to keep that 90% alive and respect it. When I was coming into this job, Wayne said to me: “Phil, there’s this very important case involving the right of voters to be able to have every (Electoral College) vote count. Voters know it as the “faithless electors” case. You need to keep an eye on it.” So, I started doing that. And then I got to argue that case at the US Supreme Court in Justice Ginsburg’s last argument, and Wayne was a great supporter in the work he did with our team… To quote (John) Adams, ‘we are a nation of laws, not of men.’ “

Gazette: Tell us more about the dissenting opinion Justice Scalia shared with Justice Ginsburg in the VMI case. How did that strengthen what became the majority opinion?

Weiser: A quote by Niels Bohr (acclaimed Danish physicist), says “the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.” In the law, you can have competing principles where there’s truth in both. Scalia said the people of Virginia should make this decision, not judges. And for Scalia, that was a go-to principle. We’ve talked about this in Roe v. Wade. Ginsburg had respect for Scalia’s jurisprudence. And so, she took his arguments seriously. She thought about them and responded to them. And the point was, by thinking hard about someone else’s position, listening to it, learning from it, adapting and responding, you end up with better results.

Gazette: Justice Ginsburg was very much a defender of equal protection guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment. This seemed to be her primary focus, correct?

Weiser: Yes. For her, the VMI case was about equality. Her view was the stare had a stereotype that said women couldn’t serve in a military institute. This, she believed, was putting them in an unequal position and was perpetuating a stereotype and it wasn’t based on the merits.

Gazette: You (Weiser) clerked for Byron White, who voted against Roe v. Wade. I believe he was against abortion, is that correct?

Weiser: That is a different point… His kids have said, I believe in the context of LGBTQ rights, he had a view of jurisprudence regarding the role of judging in a democratic society. Personally, I never asked him what his view (of abortion) was or how he would have treated the issue if he were in the legislature. But I think his decision was more about his role as a judge and less on the substance or the public policy merits of abortion rights.

Gazette: You later clerked for Justice Ginsburg, who never liked the ruling in Roe v Wade. Yet, she was very much a pro-choice jurist. She believed in a woman’s right to choose, but she didn’t like that majority opinion in that case. Please explain that?

Weiser: She didn’t like the rationale in the majority opinion. They used a due process rationale, and she thought they should have used an equal protection rationale. She also didn’t like how quickly the court got to the issue. The prior case involved birth control, Griswold v. Connecticut. When that was decided, Connecticut was the only state that didn’t allow married couples to have access to contraception. Byron (White) concurred with the majority in that case (allowing contraception). When Roe came along, it was part of an ongoing effort to liberalize access to abortions. Colorado had already done so, but many states hadn’t. And her view is the court should have given more time and space for that issue to be handled in a democratic process before the court got to it. So, she had a healthy view of how the court intersected with democracy, and she thought that the democratic process should have had more time to play out before the court got involved.

Gazette: So, if they were both on the court today how do you think each would rule on the Dobbs case that may overturn Roe v. Wade this year?

Weiser: On Roe, White’s vote was consistent. He was on the court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and he dissented there as well. So, he hadn’t changed on Roe, and Ginsburg’s position never changed either. She merely said she would justify the Roe decision differently.

Gazette: What role do the media play in our divisive politics, which you are trying to address with the Ginsburg-Scalia Initiative? What role do they play in our widespread division?

Williams: I’m older than Phil, so I don’t know if he remembers this. But, when I was growing up the nightly news ended with “and that’s the way it is, Tuesday, August 14^th (quoting former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite). It was more focused on a factual presentation. And there was not a stratification where everyone was trying to appeal to their own audiences. Now we have the 24-hour news cycle. “That the way it is,” accounting for commercials, was about 23 minutes of news. With the new model, we have “what do I report the rest of the time? I have to have something.”

Secondly, we’ve witnessed the stratification where people can now turn to the news source that most meshes with their own worldview, so they never have to hear someone who disagrees with them. I did a news segment with the former Hispanic Democrat secretary of state in New Mexico. At the time, I was the white-male Republican secretary of state in Colorado. They ended our segment early because Maggie (Toulouse Oliver) and I were agreeing with each other. It was not something they wanted to broadcast because it wasn’t controversial enough. That’s what talking heads are like on cable news. They want that controversy. And that’s not just in politics. Go over to ESPN and they are passionately arguing over whether (NFL quarterback) Tom Brady is the GOAT (greatest of all time).

Weiser: There’s something I want to underscore: Ad hominem attacks and demonization are a threat to our democratic republic. We are all Coloradans. We are all people. There’s a spiritual dimension and perspective in that mix. Families are being divided, ripped apart by who you voted for in an election. So, there’s a profoundly deep cause with this project. It includes many institutions, but journalism is an important one. Higher education and the entire education system also need to attend to this. And I would start from a principle that I think a lot about, which is this idea of a learning mindset when someone sees something different than you rather than the instinct to condemn and demonize them. As Wayne (Williams) said, there are certain marketplace pressures that if you want more followers on Twitter, you probably are better off demonizing people because that gets people’s emotions up. If you want to get written about in the newspaper, you may be better served by engaging in political attacks. We both skew those paths, but I recognize that they are rewarded in some ways.

Gazette: I’m old enough to remember the relationship that Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill had and why it was important, especially with world events as they are today. There is a great contrast between our democracy and what’s happening in Russia today, where there is no tolerance for any discussion. In fact, those who try to speak up are punished brutally.

Weiser: This could have easily been called the Reagan-O’Neill Initiative. It was a less natural construct for me to adopt. But I think Reagan’s spirit and Tip O’Neill’s spirit were absolutely one of viewing other people with goodwill, good faith, and collaboration. When you have principled conversations, you can see areas for collaboration. As a state attorney general. I’m fortunate that I’m living in a world where I work with both Democrats and Republicans — whether it’s condemning what happened on January 6, whether it’s the opioid epidemic, whether it’s antitrust. Those are issues where we work together based on principle and a shared commitment to work together. And that’s how democracies work. As you put it beautifully, it requires a commitment to free speech. What Putin is doing in Russia is the definition of tyranny. He is shutting down avenues for free speech and he’s seeking to basically torment and kill a population that wants to be free. And in (Volodymyr) Zelensky (president of Ukraine), you see a true hero and fighter for democracy and justice – a descendant of Holocaust survivors standing up against tyranny. So,  this is a powerful historical moment. And we are reminded about our tradition, which is one that is committed to justice and democracy and free speech and freedom. It’s a moment to recognize that our democratic republic has core values that unite all of us as Americans.

Williams: I really appreciate the work The Gazette has done. I think of the Bike Lane Forum over at Pikes Peak Center. Hundreds of people packed a room to passionately debate bike lanes. Yet, The Gazette pulled people together and had folks speak from different perspectives. Let me emphasize the Reagan-O’Neill relationship. Tip O’Neill certainly could have sent the Reagan tax cuts to a kill committee and never brought them up for a vote. Right? We see the kill-committee tactic happen a lot in the state legislature and it’s not a secret. Republicans and Democrats have each had a kill committee when they’re in charge, and they use it to avoid having to deal with some of the other side’s important issues..

Gazette: No matter how reasonable it is. No matter how small. This happens all the time in Colorado, right?

Williams: As the Secretary of State, I kept saying we should have photo ID (for voting), but it always died in a kill committee. It never even came to a vote. So you had three people, three Democratic senators kill it, and it never came to a vote from there. And so that’s something that’s different. Phil and I can work together on our policy issues. Phil chairs the Police Officers Standards Training Advisory Board, and he also recommended to Governor Polis that he appoint me to that board as someone who worked on our local Law Enforcement Transparency and Accountability Commission. And so, I serve on that important board that Phil chairs. So, we are talking about issues and some of them are tough to talk about at times, but we must be willing to have that dialogue. During my last year as secretary of state, we passed four bills in the legislature with zero no votes in the state Senate because we found those things we could get agreement on and went forward with them. If you never have that dialogue, you never find out those areas where you do have this overlap to say this is something we can both agree on. Washington right now is broken. That world of Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan is nowhere in Washington. In Colorado, we’re still holding on to some of those norms. Washington is not functioning. At least, we can still function in Colorado.

Gazette: Back to media, Silicon Valley plays a huge role in this dilemma of division. When social media first emerged on the scene, it was an opportunity for cordial discussion. It has devolved to an open sewer of putdowns and ad hominem attacks. Whenever a new social media platform comes along, it seems to get worse. How does the Ginsburg-Scalia project deal with that monster?

Williams: We’re talking about it and thinking about it. When we had our summer conference here in Colorado Springs, we had an airing of the movie “The Social Dilemma,” which talked about this threat to democracy. Part of what’s happening on these platforms is misinformation is pushed out so aggressively that people don’t have the ability to deliberate based on facts because everyone’s getting their own version of what they’re being told they should believe. And there’s no question social media has posed a threat to democracy. And there’s a range of ways in which that’s happened, including advertisements on social media. So, there’s a lot of work to be done to protect democracy in the wake of how social media is operating. I also think part of what we’re dealing with is the bottom-up norms. We need people to get in the habit of not so quickly believing something that they see on a social media platform, but instead take more time to research it, give people a little more good faith, and not use ad hominem attacks.

Weiser: I think it was exacerbated during COVID because you never had to see people. The platforms allow you to attack someone without being in front of them. There’s a natural tendency amongst people when you’re meeting them in person to ameliorate a little bit of what you do. Those societal norms go away when you’re posting on Facebook or tweeting at 2-or-3 a.m.

Gazette: We’d like to thank you both for the Ginsburg-Scalia Initiative. We hope it makes constructive change and we thank you for discussing it with us today.