Dana El-Kurd
speaker
4,891 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 30 May
Dana El-Kurd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That move elevated President George W. Bush to the White House.
In this effort, James Ho rubbed shoulders with right-wing luminaries, like the man who in five years would be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.
Ho rocketed to judicial superstardom.
He clerked for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for a couple of years.
Then from 2008 to 2010, he succeeded Ted Cruz as Solicitor General of Texas.
There he handled appeals filed by the state in cases heard by the state Supreme Court and the U.S.
Supreme Court.
On January 4th, 2018, Host celebrated his next rapid climb up the judicial ladder when he is sworn as the newest judge on the United States Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees federal cases that originate in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana.
Ho's swearing-in ceremony took place at the mansion of Dallas real estate billionaire Harlan Crow.
You've probably heard that name before, because Crow has made news with the revelation that he lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts and favors on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, including cruises to Indonesian islands on the businessman's 162-foot superyacht and a $119,000 Bible that once belonged to leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
Crow flew Thomas to Dallas on his private jet so the justice could swear in his former clerk.
The surroundings included Crow's unnerving souvenirs once described on the program Inside Edition.
The estate also includes what Crowe has called the Garden of Evil, a collection of imposing statues of past authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nikolai Ceausescu, the eccentric Romanian tyrant violently deposed in 1989, as well as a bust of Gavrilo Princip, the Bosnian Serb nationalist who triggered World War I with his assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Crowe claims that his collection is somehow a statement of his hatred for both communism and fascism.
The creepy artwork perhaps foreshadowed Ho's ominous career in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
On that bench, he has become infamous for weirdly written and extreme opinions in which he has suggested that the children of migrants might not be eligible for birthright citizenship because the country is being, quote, invaded and that abortion actually somehow injures doctors because they are denied the intense pleasure of delivering babies.
Those antics might lead him to one day occupy a seat on the United States Supreme Court, potentially succeeding Thomas or Samuel Alito, the two oldest justices on the nation's highest bench.
In this episode, we'll look at the career of Judge James Ho, his alarming right-wing judicial activism, and the strange history of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which since the Reagan administration has transformed from one of the most liberal judicial bodies in the country to perhaps the scariest court in America.
Given its current reactionary reputation, it's a bit ironic the Fifth Circuit Court convenes in a New Orleans courthouse named after John Minor Wisdom, a New Orleans native who formed a critical part of a quartet of liberal judges known simply as the Four, who in the 1950s and 1960s issued a series of revolutionary rulings that advanced the civil rights movement.
President Dwight Eisenhower appointed Wisdom to the bench in 1957.
Showing 2761–2780 of 4,891 · page 139 of 245
← Previous
Next →