When Ron DeSantis became Florida’s governor in January 2019, I highlighted the prospect that he could undo the dominance that liberal justices have had on the state supreme court for decades. As I pointed out, that dominance persisted despite the fact that Florida hadn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994.
There is ample reason to believe that DeSantis has succeeded in transforming that court.
Today DeSantis appointed circuit judge Renatha Francis to the supreme court. An attorney very knowledgeable about Francis and her record assures me that she is a strong originalist and textualist and an excellent pick. You can watch her beautiful acceptance remarks here (beginning around the 12:00 mark). The fact that she is also an immigrant from Jamaica whose life is (in her words) the “epitome of the American dream” will feed the fury of the Left.
When Francis takes her seat, DeSantis will have appointed four of the seven members of the Florida supreme court. (He’s actually appointed six justices, but two of his early picks—Barbara Lagoa and Robert Luck—were in turn appointed by Donald Trump to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.) DeSantis has transformed what was long a 5-to-2 liberal majority into a 6-to-1 textualist majority.
Francis will be replacing another textualist justice, so her appointment won’t alter the court’s ideological alignment. But it might well help to entrench it for another two decades or more. The Florida supreme court has a mandatory retirement age of 75, but the oldest of DeSantis’s four appointees won’t hit that mark until 2044. So DeSantis’s appointees could constitute a majority of the court until then.