Dana El-Kurd

If he miraculously returned, Wisdom would not recognize the appeals court that he spent so much of his life serving.

We'll talk about the transformation of the Fifth Circuit of Appeals, the extreme and disturbing decisions it has made since the start of the Trump era, and the career of one of that court's most infamous judges when we come back from our hopefully less infamous sponsors.

In 1981, the federal judiciary was reorganized.

The Fifth Circuit Court now heard appeals only from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas.

A new Eleventh Circuit Court now hears cases from Alabama, Georgia, and Florida.

We should provide a hopefully brief civics lesson here.

The Fifth Court consists of 17 active judges and nine senior judges.

When a side loses a case in a federal district court, they can appeal to a circuit court where the case is heard by a three-judge panel.

In some cases, if one side disagrees with the judgment of the panel, they may appeal the decision to the full judicial court.

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.