Judge Ho Says SCOTUS Critics See Half of US’ Views as ‘Garbage’

Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho, a Donald Trump appointee and potential future US Supreme Court justice, said he believes that “many” of the academics who criticize the high court consider the “views of half the country as garbage.”

“In the six years that I’ve been a judge, I’ve come to an understanding about academics who commentate about the Supreme Court,” Ho said Friday. “Too many academics regard the views of half the country as garbage.”

He made the comments as he opened a virtual Federalist Society panel on academic freedom that he was moderating.

Ho’s “garbage” remarks echoed a gaffe by President Joe Biden in the final days of the 2024 US presidential election campaign, in which the president called Trump supporters “garbage,” after a comedian at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”

Biden later said he didn’t intend to say that, and Democratic nominee and Vice President Kamala Harris distanced herself from the comments. Trump soon after did a photo op with a garbage truck.

The US Supreme Court dramatically changed during the first Trump administration, as then-President Donald Trump made three appointments to the bench. Some of the court’s rulings in recent years have been met with strong public backlash, including the 2022 decision to overturn the national constitutional right to abortion codified in Roe v. Wade.

Ho is seen a strong contender to be appointed as a justice, if the high court has any future vacancies during Trump’s upcoming term. A former solicitor general of Texas appointed by Trump to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Ho was on a shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees that Trump released during his first term.

Ho has waded into issues in academia before, promising to no longer hire law clerks from Stanford Law, Yale Law, and Columbia University, over those institutions’ handling of student protesters.