Judge James C. Ho said the ideal Supreme Court nominee should be humble and honest. Speaking at an event in Washington this month, the Trump-appointed judge suggested presidents pick people who are ideologically consistent. Many Trump supporters now want loyalists, fearing current conservative justices are becoming unreliably centrist swing votes.
For years, Supreme Court aspirants have avoided talking about how they might rule. Trump's frustrations with his first-term picks could change that.
It is rare for a sitting federal appeals court judge to offer advice on what kind of people to nominate to the Supreme Court.
But speaking at an event in Washington this month, a Trump-appointed federal judge bluntly criticized recent rulings from the justices and offered guidance on what he called "biblically based principles of judicial selection."
The ideal Supreme Court nominee, said Judge James C. Ho, would be humble and honest -- and ideologically consistent. That is, he said, "one of the men who have been with us the whole time." Considered himself to be on the shortlist for a possible Supreme Court nod, Judge Ho added that presidents should choose judges "whose goal isn't to get onto a bench, but to get into heaven."
Judge Ho delivered the remarks, which were posted online last week, to a group of Christian activists meeting at the Museum of the Bible. His comments channeled frustrations shared by Mr. Trump and his base that the Supreme Court's six-judge conservative supermajority -- three of whom are Mr. Trump's appointees -- have failed to uniformly back his agenda.
Despite a string of conservative wins on abortion, gun rights, and gerrymandering, there is a sense on the Trump-aligned right that Justices Brett M. Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil M. Gorsuch are becoming unreliably centrist swing votes -- "squishes" in the online parlance -- in the mold of Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and David H. Souter.