President Trump may soon be the first commander-in-chief since President Eisenhower to appoint a majority of the justices of the United States Supreme Court, should two vacancies occur within the next four years. He has a deep bench from which to choose, and may have the opportunity to cement a conservative majority for the next 30 years. 

Trump may be in a unique position to get some high court picks just due simply to math — four of the nine justices will be in their seventies by the end of the second Trump administration. 

He has also stacked the federal bench with countless qualified jurists who may have a relatively easy time getting through the soon-to-be Republican-controlled Senate. While serving as president, Trump appointed 226 individuals to serve in the federal judiciary — the highest number for a one-term president since President Carter. Some of those jurists have made names for themselves in recent years, and could have the legal acumen and the pedigree to win a nomination from the Trump White House. 

Judge James Ho may be at the top of that list, having met the president-elect’s unofficial requirements in terms of academic and career successes, combative style, and substantive conservative record. 

An immigrant from Free China, Judge Ho studied at Stanford University and the University of Chicago’s law school, which led him to clerk at the Fifth Circuit, take an associate position at the prestigious Gibson Dunn law firm, assist Theodore Olson in the Bush v. Gore case, and finally to clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas at the Supreme Court. 

After serving as Texas’s solicitor general from 2008 to 2010, Judge Ho was appointed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by Trump in 2018 at the urging of Senator Cruz, who was Judge Ho’s predecessor as the Lone Star state’s top litigator. When the New York Sun profiled Judge Ho last year, Mr. Cruz described the jurist as “one of the finest appellate judges in the nation” who is “faithful to the text of the Constitution, compelling in his judicial opinions, and devoted to the Rule of Law.”

Judge Ho has issued a number of opinions, concurrences, and dissents from his perch at the Fifth Circuit that have many believing he wants the next open seat on the court. He helped strike down the federal prohibition on those under domestic violence restraining orders from owning firearms, described the “moral tragedy” of abortion in the appellate decision in the Dobbs case before it made its way to the high court, and wrote on the importance of America’s sovereignty with respect to illegal immigration. 

Just this month, in an interview, Judge Ho said that there may be no right to birthright citizenship under the Constitution if the children born here to foreign nationals come as a result of “war or invasion,” which is how he describes what is happening at the southern border. 

“No one to my knowledge has ever argued that the children of invading aliens are entitled to birthright citizenship. And I can’t imagine what the legal argument for that would be,” Judge Ho said. Ending birthright citizenship was a key promise of Trump’s 2024 campaign. 

Over the course of the last two years, Judge Ho has led a movement by conservative judges to place an embargo on hiring law clerks from certain law schools — specifically Yale, Stanford, and Columbia — for what he sees as violations of free speech and the schools’ fostering of antisemitism.

Among those who fought with him on the embargo on other judges who could be nominated by Trump for a seat on the high court. 

Judge Ho barred graduates of Stanford Law School from serving as clerks in his chambers because some left-wing students had protested Judge Kyle Duncan, also of the Fifth Circuit, because he had once refused to use a transgender defendant’s preferred pronouns during court proceedings. Judge Duncan’s star rose after he was shouted down, and according to the New York Times, he is on an unofficial shortlist of Supreme Court nominees. 

Judge Duncan was also included on a list of potential court nominees in 2020 shortly before the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. 

After Justice Ginsburg’s passing in September of that year, many observers focused on the women who were placed on the list, given that Trump may not have wanted to include an iconic female justice with a man. Ultimately, Justice Amy Coney Barrett was selected for the open seat, though the runner-up for that nomination, Judge Barbara Lagoa, may also be under consideration. 

In the past, Trump has included some non-judges on his Supreme Court lists, including Mr. Cruz, Senator Cotton, and Senator Lee.

It was reported in 2020 that Solicitor General Noel Francisco’s name was floating around in some legal circles for a seat on the court. The president-elect’s strong slate of federal judges he was able to install on the bench during his first term, however, may give him much more fertile ground from which to reap during his second stay at the White House.