Long before he became one of the most powerful judges in the country, James Ho sat down with one of his heroes, Edwin Meese III, in Washington, D.C. Ho was 26, fresh out of the University of Chicago Law School, and had come to interview Meese for a law journal article. Sixty-seven-year-old Meese had been a conservative star since the eighties, when he ranked among President Ronald Reagan’s most trusted aides, serving as counselor and attorney general. He had endeared himself to Christian leaders by declaring in a speech that out of all the laws written by mankind, “we haven’t improved one iota on the Ten Commandments.” Meese had resigned in 1988, after an independent counsel investigated possible ethics violations, then drifted into Washington’s small…