Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) said Friday that if he wins the presidency in 2024, his Supreme Court picks would be like conservative justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.
“As president, I will nominate and appoint Supreme Court justices in the form of Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito,” DeSantis said to applause at the conservative Faith & Freedom Coalition conference in Washington.
The GOP governor also pledged to defend both justices against “rogue attacks” by “the media and by leftist groups” for their apparent ethical errors.
“I support Judge Thomas. I stand with Justice Alito in light of these attacks,” he said.
The “attacks” he talked about aren’t exactly gross; both judges are the subject of bombshell research reports by ProPublica who found they had accepted lavish travel from Republican mega-donors who had corporate or corporate interests for the Supreme Court. Neither Thomas nor Alito reported these trips. And Thomas’ mother still lives rent-free in a home bought by billionaire Harlan Crow, who paid the bills for Thomas’s decades of travel.
DeSantis was one of several GOP presidential candidates speaking at Friday’s event — South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy also attended — but he was the only one to speak of his plans for the Supreme Court.
He knew his audience. Former President Donald Trump provoked conservatives ahead of his 2016 election by promising to put their favorite picks on the court. He even published a shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees that was full of conservative candidates. Those posts earned him the support of powerful legal organizations such as The Federalist Society.
After Trump became president, The Federalist Society essentially fed him a pipeline of conservative legal choices throughout his time in the White House. All of Trump’s Supreme Court picks are members of the Federalist Society. Virtually all of its appeals court judges are, too. Some of his choices from the court are also members.
DeSantis is clearly angling to be the candidate who would be best for conservatives — even better than Trump — in terms of the courts. With right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt DeSantis asked last week if he committed to electing people to federal court seats similar to Trump’s three Supreme Court justices, DeSantis would fire at the former president.
“Well, actually I’d say we’ll do better,” he replied.
“I mean, I respect the three appointees he appointed, but none of those three are on the same level as Judges Thomas and Judge Alito,” DeSantis said. “I think they’re the gold standard, and so my judges will be in the vein of a Sam Alito and a Clarence Thomas.”
Drew Angerer via Getty Images
In his remarks Friday, Florida’s governor warned of progressive groups calling for the Supreme Court to be expanded.
“The left knows they’ve lost control of the court and they don’t like it,” DeSantis said. “If they can sweep in ’24, they’re going to overload the Supreme Court with liberal judges. You might have 13 people on the Supreme Court after they’re done with it.
He added: “They are hard at work on this attempt to lay the groundwork for delegitimizing our great conservative judges.”
Of course, progressive groups and Democratic legislators would argue that the court itself is already delegitimized and in dire need of reform.
That’s the problem two “stolen” chairs, a term sometimes used in reference to Republicans who helped Trump confirm two of his picks by blocking the confirmation of President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland and then ramming through Amy Coney Barrett just days before the 2020 presidential election — while millions of people voted for Joe Biden.
And not only did the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority last year break long-standing precedent by overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, but the two most conservative justices — Thomas and Alito, the DeSantis model judges — hinted that they would like to revise other landmark rulings to potentially repeal more rights, including the 2015 decision that granted same-sex couples the constitutional right to marry.