Politics

‘A 7-2 Conservative Majority’: DeSantis Teases His Plan For The Supreme Court

Supreme Court (By Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16959908)

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis revealed his thoughts on how the next president will impact the Supreme Court during a speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention Monday night.

DeSantis noted that the president over the next two terms may need to find replacements for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — “the issue with that is, you can’t really do better than those two,” he said during his Monday speech. Replacing Thomas with somebody like Chief Justice John Roberts would mean “you’re actually going to see the court move to the left,” he said.

“They are the gold standard for jurisprudence,” he said. “So you’ve got to make sure that we’re appointing people who are going to be as close to that standard as possible.”

DeSantis said the president could even be called on to replace Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sonia Sotomayor over the next eight years, noting it could enable the next president to appoint a 7-2 conservative majority.

“If you were able to do that, you would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter century,” he said. “This is big stuff.”

DeSantis highlighted his own role in moving the Florida state Supreme Court in a more conservative direction.

“I inherited a very liberal state supreme court,” he said. “But the good news was, we have age limits for justices.”

“I was able, in my first month in office, to replace three liberal justices with three conservative justices.”