Ron DeSantis has teased his expected announcement that he’s putting his hat in the ring for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as he took a subtle dig at his main rival, former President Donald Trump.
As he pitched the appointment of a seventh right-leaning justice to the Supreme Court, the Florida governor noted how he, if elected president, would be able to run for re-election and spend eight years in the White House, unlike Mr Trump who would only be able to serve one term as he has already spent four years as the commander-in-chief.
Mr DeSantis appeared at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Orlando, Florida on Monday, saying that the 2024 election could decide the makeup of the nation’s highest court for the next quarter-century.
The governor told the audience that four of the Supreme Court’s nine current justices may leave their posts over the next eight years.
Clarence Thomas is 74 years old, while Samuel Alito is 73, and Chief Justice John Roberts and Sonia Sotomayor are both 68.
In that group, only Justice Sotomayor has a more progressive bent, while Chief Justice Roberts has at times voted with the court’s left-leaning justices on some social issues.
Mr DeSantis would attempt to replace them all with rightward judges, entrenching the court’s current six-three conservative advantage.
“I think if you look over the next two presidential terms there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito and the issue with that is, you can’t really do better than those two,” Mr DeSantis said, according to the Daily Mail.
“If you replace a Clarence Thomas with somebody like a Roberts or somebody like that, then you’re gonna actually see the court move to the left, and you can’t do that,” he added.
“So it is possible that in those eight years, we have the opportunity to fortify justices Alito and Thomas as well as actually make improvements with those others, and 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 to applause from the audience.
Mr DeSantis looks set to announce his candidacy on Wednesday in Miami. While the Republican nomination is believed to be a fight between the governor and Mr Trump, the former president remains a heavy favourite according to recent polling.
The governor also spoke about his initiatives to “protect faith and family” in what could be interpreted as a dig at the three-times married former president who was recently found liable by a court in Manhattan of sexually assaulting and defaming the columnist E Jean Carroll. Mr Trump is also criminally accused of trying to illegally influence the 2016 presidential election through pay-offs to a porn star and a Playboy model he is alleged to have had affairs with. He denies any wrongdoing.
“We’re working with groups that are addressing the needs of the father and trying to get them engaged with their kids,” Mr DeSantis said, according to Fox News.
“Even if you have the kids that are born of a father in prison, we are using these resources to foster mentorship opportunities for kids that do not have that” kind of support, he added.
“And if you look at when kids do well … it’s when somebody is willing to take an interest in them,” he said. “If you have somebody in the community that takes an interest, that child can be so much better in the future.”
Mr DeSantis also claimed that children “need to understand the foundations of our country. They need to understand our Constitution and our Bill of Rights and understand what it means to be an American”.
