Since James Ho was confirmed to the Fifth Circuit in 2017, he has not allowed a day to pass without thinking about how to parlay this gig to get what he really wants: a promotion to the Supreme Court the next time a vacancy should arise under a Republican president. Delivering paint-by-numbers speeches about the excesses of cancel culture, condemning the scourge of racism against white people, and writing unironic opinions bemoaning the rise of a “woke Constitution” are not the sorts of things federal judges typically do, unless they measure success in the number of times they are mentioned during the Fox & Friends A-block.

Earlier this week, Ho delivered yet another highlight. Back on March 4, the Federal Judges Association—which is, as the name suggests, a national association of federal judges—issued a statement condemning the escalating threats of violence against judges who have blocked Trump administration initiatives in some form or another. Days later, Ho announced to an audience of aspiring Fifth Circuit clerks at a Federalist Society student conference that he had up and resigned from the FJA in protest of this “sanctimonious” little stunt. I want to be clear about what James Ho is proud of here: throwing a semi-public tantrum over a fairly milquetoast assertion that it is bad when people threaten to kill his colleagues on the internet.

The gravamen of Ho’s complaint is that FJA had not, in Ho’s opinion, sufficiently condemned previous criticisms of Justices Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, or Brett Kavanaugh, all of whom Ho hopes to one day have the privilege of serving coffee during conference. “You can’t say that you’re in favor of judicial independence only when it comes to decisions that you like,” explained Ho, whose commitment to defending “free speech” generally ends the moment someone has the temerity to disagree with speech he likes. “That’s not protecting the judiciary, that’s politicizing the judiciary.” Do you see what he did there? With the alliteration? Neil Gorsuch’s reign as the Court’s most insufferable writer might come to an end soon!

Perhaps aware that FedSoc speeches alone will not dislodge Aileen Cannon as the prohibitive favorite, Ho has also infused his opinions of late with conservative dogma that just so happens to align with the sitting president’s policy agenda. “A sovereign isn’t a sovereign if it can’t defend itself against invasion,” Ho wrote last year, in a case about Texas’s efforts to take immigration enforcement into his own hands. In a follow-up interview published by The Volokh Conspiracy, Ho argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship does not apply in cases of “invasion,” a word that, in his view, applies to people trying to enter the country with nothing more than the clothing on their backs.