Gov. Ron DeSantis used secretive panel to flip state Supreme Court

[In It to Win It]

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For decades, the ambitions of Florida’s Republican governors were stymied by the liberal-leaning state Supreme Court.

That is, until Ron DeSantis was elected.

The court let him erase a congressional district with a large Black population. It opened the door to a law making it easier to impose the death penalty. Now, it’s poised to rule on the governor’s plan to outlaw most abortions in the third-most-populous state.

The hard-right turn was by design. DeSantis seized on the unusual retirement of three liberal justices at once to quickly remake the court. He did so with the help of a secretive panel led by Leonard Leo — the key architect of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority — that quietly vetted judicial nominees in an Orlando conference room three weeks before the governor’s inauguration.

“So what I do is I convene a group of people that I trust — some people in Florida, some people outside of the state who you would know, who I’m not going to say, because you know, it’s private,” DeSantis later said on a conservative podcast. “Then they put these candidates through the wringer.”

After taking office in January 2019, DeSantis appointed three new justices in two weeks, flipping the court from what he described as a 4-3 liberal majority to a 6-1 conservative advantage.