DeSantis Gets Opening to Vie With Trump on Conservative Justices

A vacancy on Florida’s Supreme Court has given Ron DeSantis a path to cement his legacy of shifting the bench farther right as he vies with former President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination.

DeSantis, who now has a seventh choice for the state’s top court, shows the same appetite as Trump for culture warriors on the bench who will uphold conservative causes.

One of DeSantis’ political trademarks is a penchant for provocation, and he’s likely to seek nominees who share his willingness to challenge precedents, Georgia State University College of Law professor Anthony Michael Kreis said.

“I would not expect him to shy away from a fight or to pick nominees who would not relish in leaning into that kind of cultural war,” Kreis said.

DeSantis’ Florida judicial appointments help him “fill out his narrative” for voters in states with early presidential primaries, said veteran Republican strategist Scott Reed, the former top political adviser to the US Chamber of Commerce.

“Nothing turns on GOP primary voters like strong, conservative Supreme Court judges with long terms,” he said in an email.

But DeSantis’ overhauling the Florida Supreme Court is “pretty small beer” compared to what Trump achieved with appointments to the nation’s highest court, said Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican strategist in Florida who left the party when Trump took over.

“Trump has already trumped him, if you will,” he said in an interview. “It doesn’t move the ball for him with Trump voters compared to Trump and his appointments to the US Supreme Court. He just can’t compete on that topic.”

A better question, he said, is whether DeSantis would try to replicate on the national level the kind of legislation he’s known for in Florida that promptly draws court challenges, such as state limits on social media companies blocked by a Trump appointee to the Eleventh Circuit, Judge Kevin Newsom.

DeSantis “just doesn’t care, because it’s not about the policy, it’s about the performance,” Stipanovich said.

Bench Makeup

Of the current Florida Supreme Court justices, Chief Justice Carlos Muniz and Justices John Couriel, Jamie Grosshans, and Renatha Francis were named to the court by DeSantis.

Justices Jorge Labarga and Charles Canady were former Governor Charlie Crist’s appointees, along with Justice Ricky Polston who retired at the end of March, giving DeSantis his seventh pick to the state’s top court since 2019.

Women accounted for nearly a quarter of Trump’s federal judge picks, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. However, only 16% of his picks weren’t white, less than his Republican predecessor George W. Bush.

By contrast, DeSantis has explicitly talked about diversity when choosing justices for the state’s supreme court. His picks include three women. Three of the appointees have been Hispanic, and Francis, a Black immigrant from Jamaica, is the first Caribbean-American to sit on the bench. Francis is only the second Black woman named to the court—the first retired in 2019—and when the court rejected DeSantis’ initial attempt to appoint Francis in 2020, he noted that the bench didn’t have any Black justices at that time.

Trump nominated two of DeSantis’ first appointees, Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck, to the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. With the next appointment, five of the seven seats on the Florida Supreme Court will be held by DeSantis appointees.

Flipping the Bench

DeSantis’s appointments—like Trump, he often chooses conservative Federalist Society members—shifted the court to a more conservative bench, said Aubrey Jewett, a political science professor at the University of Central Florida.

“It’s a different mindset on that court now, and it’s really affected to some degree not only the governor, but the Legislature, because they’re emboldened,” Jewett said. “They feel like they can pass a lot more conservative legislation that maybe in the past would have been declared unconstitutional.”

For example, he pointed to a redistricting map crafted by the governor’s office that eliminated a majority-Black voting district drawn by Florida’s top court in 2015 to remedy partisan gerrymandering. Last year, the court declined to hear a challenge to the map, allowing it to take effect for the mid-term elections.

Conservatives see DeSantis’ picks as a needed correction to a perceived leftward bent in previous panels.

Both DeSantis and Trump “understand what judges are supposed to do in our system of government, and they choose judges accordingly,” Thomas Jipping, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, said.

While it’s the president who nominates federal judges and US Supreme Court justices, DeSantis already has made an impact on US appellate courts, with two of his appointees now sitting on the Eleventh Circuit.

Lagoa fit the model for a “conservative firebrand” along the lines of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and she’d likely be considered a contender for the US Supreme Court, as she was in 2020, if a Republican wins the White House in 2024, Kreis said.

Looking at his judicial choices in Florida, if DeSantis were elected president, “you would not see a deviation from the kind of nominees that Donald Trump put on the federal bench,” he said.

Opportunity Knocks

DeSantis had an early opportunity to overhaul the state supreme court when he first took office because, at the time, state law mandated justices retire at age 70, and three Crist appointees at that age were forced to step down.

He’s done what any other governor does when given the chance to overhaul a court, said Jonathan Marshfield, a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had a large hand in shaping that state’s highest court, where five of the six current judges were appointed by the Democrat. Last summer’s Iowa Supreme Court reversal of a 2018 ruling that guaranteed the right to abortion under the state Constitution followed four appointments by Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), who took office in 2017.

“You almost feel like it’s your obligation, if you’re a controlling party, to make sure that courts are not getting in the way of what you understand to be your popular mandate,” Marshfield said.

DeSantis won reelection with 59.4% of the vote in November.

He also made five appointments to the nine-member commission that gives him a list of judges to choose from for the state’s supreme court.

That commission currently includes attorneys from Greenberg Traurig LLP, Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, DLA Piper, Shutts & Bowen LLP, and Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney.

The commission expects to begin interviewing candidates in early May.