DeSantis pledges to ‘do better’ than Trump on picking Supreme Court justices

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) took aim Monday at former President Trump’s Supreme Court picks, vowing to “do better” than his 2024 rival in picking justices.

Conservative radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt asked DeSantis if he would pledge to Republican primary voters that his judges would be like the “three home runs” that Trump nominated to the high court.

“Well, actually, I would say we’ll do better than that,” DeSantis responded. 

“I mean, I respect the three appointees he did, but none of those three are at the same level of Justices [Clarence] Thomas and Justice [Samuel] Alito,” DeSantis continued. “I think they are the gold standard, and so my justices will be along the lines of a Sam Alito and a Clarence Thomas.”

Trump’s three nominees — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — delivered a 6-3 conservative majority at the Supreme Court that has enabled a number of conservative legal victories, including overturning Roe v. Wade as well as expanding gun and religious rights.

But the court doesn’t always show a straight conservative-liberal split in its politically charged cases.

On Thursday, Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberals in striking down Alabama’s Republican-drawn congressional map, upholding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in its current form.

DeSantis for weeks has touted the records of Alito and Thomas, two of the court’s most conservative justices, who joined the bench prior to Trump’s presidency, while notably steering clear of highlighting Trump’s nominees.

Just prior to announcing his campaign, DeSantis envisioned expanding the conservative majority even further, publicly touting how he could shape a 7-2 court if elected to two terms as president.

“And in Florida, I inherited a very liberal state supreme court, maybe the most liberal in the country, very activist,” DeSantis told Hewitt on Monday.

“But I was able to replace three of the four liberals my first month in office with conservative justices,” he added. “I’ve since been able to make a number of appointments since then. So we now have the most conservative state supreme court in the country. And so I think we have a really good track record on doing that.”

DeSantis had heaped praise on Gorsuch and Barrett when Trump nominated them.

“If you created a nominee from scratch with the goal of filling Scalia’s large shoes, such a nominee would look a lot like Neil Gorsuch,” DeSantis, a congressman at the time, tweeted in January 2017.

When Trump nominated Kavanaugh, however, who has become viewed as the so-called “median justice” on the Supreme Court, DeSantis’s accolades weren’t as strong.

“Whether Kavanaugh will be a fearless defender of Constitution in mold of Justice Thomas remains to be seen. Let’s hope so!” DeSantis said at the time.

Updated at 2:09 pm ET.