Dana El-Kurd

I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a book about racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author, with longtime journalist Betsy Freehoff, of a history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife.

I'm Stephen Monticelli.

I'm a journalist who specializes in covering political extremism and far-right internet culture for The Texas Observer, The Barbed Wire, and other publications.

Today, we'll be talking about the Fifth Circuit.

And we'll start with a man named James Ho, who on what might have been the biggest day of his judicial career so far, couldn't have picked a creepier setting.

The 52-year-old's legal career has rocketed forward at light speed.

Born in Taiwan and a graduate of Stanford, he signed up as an attorney for the white shoe law firm Gibson Dunn in California.

In 2000, at age 27, he joined a high-powered legal team that forever shaped the history of the United States.

Young and almost entirely unknown outside of legal circles, James Ho joined some of the most famous conservative lawyers in the country in the year 2000 to convince the United States Supreme Court to stop the hotly contested presidential vote count in Florida.

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.