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Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said Monday evening that he could foresee a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court if the next president is in office for eight years.
The effect of having "the opportunity to fortify" conservative justices and "make improvements" with centrist or liberal justices would last a "quarter century," the governor said at the National Religious Broadcasters convention in Orlando. The Supreme Court currently has a 6-3 conservative majority.
DeSantis made the comments just as he plans to make a 2024 run for the GOP nomination for president official this week. The subtext was that if DeSantis were to win the nomination over the current frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, and then defeat President Joe Biden, then he could reshape the court over eight years, while Trump would be term-limited out after four.
DeSantis predicted that over two presidential terms the next commander in chief would get to replace Justice Clarence Thomas, 74, and Justice Samuel Alito, 73.
"You can't really do better than those two," DeSantis said. "They are the gold standard for jurisprudence."
He hypothesized the next president could even appoint replacements for Chief Justice John Roberts, 68, who sometimes sides with the liberal wing of the court, as well as Sonia Sotomayor, 68, a President Barack Obama appointee.
If the next president were to appoint someone like Roberts to replace Thomas then "you're going to actually see the court move to the left, and you can't do that."
When Trump first ran for president in 2016 ,he released a list of candidates he would consider for the Supreme Court. He appointed three justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom helped overturn the 1973 Supreme Court precedent that guaranteed a national right to abortion.
On Tuesday, DeSantis appointed Judge Meredith Sasso to the Florida Supreme Court. Sasso is the seventh he appointed to the high court since becoming governor in 2019. She's a member of the conservative American Enterprise Institute Leadership Network and the Federalist Society.
"Her fidelity to the Constitution will help preserve freedom in our state for generations to come," DeSantis said in a statement announcing the appointment.
Florida's Supreme Court is considering the state's 15-week abortion ban. If it's upheld, a ban that will make it illegal to have an abortion after six weeks in most cases will take its place.
On Monday night, DeSantis defended the six-week law as "the right thing to do" and intended "to protect an unborn child that has a detectable heartbeat," referring to the time in a pregnancy when an embryo has cardiac activity. DeSantis signed the bill just before midnight last month, without a public ceremony, and put pressure on Trump to say whether he would have signed the bill into law.
