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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Among the active judges, those appointed by Republican presidents outnumber those appointed by Democrats by a margin of 12 to 5.
Donald Trump appointed more than a third of these judges, six in all.
Each, of course, could serve on the court for the rest of their life.
The Fifth Circuit also has eight senior judges who are semi-retired but preside over a limited number of cases.
Six of them were also appointed by Republican presidents, stretching back to Ronald Reagan.
Even in that hyper-conservative company, James Ho has stood out.
Mike Davis, the president of the pro-Trump Article 3 project, a group dedicated to pushing federal courts further right, has said, quote, On every crucial but controversial legal issue, Jim Ho is constantly the tip of the spear.
It has been a cliche among the American right-wingers that liberal judges from the time of Franklin Roosevelt had become judicial activists for abusing their positions on the bench to advance their political agendas rather than impartially ruling on the law, calling balls and strikes.
Ho's open political advocacy, however, has raised no alarms for those same presumed advocates for judicial neutrality.
While he served as Texas' Solicitor General, Ho did pro bono work for the First Liberty Institute, a Christian right organization headquartered in Plano, Texas, just north of Dallas, that won a case for a Washington State high school football coach who was fired because he violated school policy by leading his team in prayer after each game.
The group has also represented bakers who refused to make wedding cakes for same-sex couples.
As a judge, Ho led a boycott of legal clerks who graduated from Yale Law School to punish that institution for its supposed leftist cancel culture and intolerance of conservative views.
During a speech to the far-right Heritage Foundation, the authors of Project 2025 said,
Ho ridiculed lawyers with, quote, fancy credentials, fancy law schools, fancy clerkships, fancy law firms and government jobs.
He claimed that issued liberal opinions for no other purpose than winning popularity.
He urged young conservatives to assert themselves against the supposed popularity of political correctness.
In addition to serving on the bench, Ho could be considered an activist, particularly on culture war issues like abortion.
He's condemned abortion as the, quote, In 2018, he upheld a Texas law that required the cremation or burial of fetal remains, a potentially costly burden for women receiving medical treatment.
And the state of Texas argued that any potential financial burdens to women or clinics were irrelevant since the Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops made a pledge to bury the remains for low cost or even for free.
Such a promise, of course, was not legally binding.
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