James Ho Understands What Trump Wants In a Supreme Court Justice - Balls and Strikes' Jay Willis

[In It to Win It]

Balls and Strikes

Getting on this White House’s Supreme Court shortlist is a matter of showing that you will be loyal to the president above all else.

Of the many Trump judges who are angling for a promotion to the Supreme Court, no one is campaigning harder than Fifth Circuit judge James Ho, whose primary metric for success is the number of times the Wall Street Journal editorial board cites him with approval each week. But in an opinion published Tuesday, Ho debuted an even more ambitious strategy for earning the president’s attention: arguing that the current Court is showing its “disrespect” for Trump, and making clear that if he were a justice, James Ho would be an obedient little boy who would never dare speak out of turn.

On Friday, the Supreme Court issued an order that temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing certain Venezuelan immigrants from the United States, reversing an earlier Fifth Circuit decision; only Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. After the Court sent the case, A.A.R.P. v. Trump, back to the Fifth Circuit for further proceedings, a three-judge panel that included Ho issued an order putting the case back on the Fifth Circuit’s schedule for oral argument. There is nothing substantive about the order, a three-sentence formality that is more or less an Outlook calendar invite. Here, see for yourself:





Ho, however, was unsatisfied with this result. Instead, he wrote a concurring opinion only for himself in which he acknowledged that although he is “duty-bound” to follow Supreme Court orders, he doesn’t “have to like it.” From there, Ho proceeded to rehash Alito’s “vigorous” dissent in A.A.R.P., quoting it eight times in seven pages to underscore his “sincere concerns” about how very unfairly the Court has treated Mister Trump in this case. What Ho understands is that to make the Supreme Court shortlist these days, it is no longer enough to simply be a conservative judge. You have to be a conservative judge with a demonstrated willingness to polish the president’s boots with your tongue upon request.

[dalton99a]

1. "He's a good ho," says Trump