Ron DeSantis debuts new attack line defending ‘great conservative Justices’

Ron DeSantis. Image via AP.

Ron DeSantis debuted a new stump speech line to strike fear into the hearts of those who approve of the Supreme Court the way that it is.

Reports that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas accepted lavish gifts from Republican megadonors represent a leftist-driven effort to delegitimize the court’s conservatives, DeSantis said. These attacks are a prelude to packing the court with those who share their liberal ideology, the Republican Governor told a group of evangelicals at the Faith & Freedom Conference this weekend.

“As President, I will nominate and appoint Justices to the Supreme Court in the mold of Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito,” he told the group, drawing some of the most enthusiastic cheers of his speech.

Those two Justices have been the focus of recent reporting from ProPublica that casts doubt on their impartiality on matters before the court. ProPublica found in April that Thomas accepted trips he did not officially disclose from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, including far-flung cruises on his yacht. And this month, ProPublica reported Alito took a private jet to an Alaskan fishing camp that rents for $1,000 a day with hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer and did not list them on his gifts disclosure.

DeSantis addressed those reports, calling them “scurrilous attacks,” and said these accounts are in no way impartial.

“The Left knows they have lost control of the court and they don’t like it,” DeSantis said.

And then he offered grave warnings to conservatives.

“If they are able to sweep in ’24, they’re going to pack the U.S. Supreme Court with liberal justices,” DeSantis said.

These reports are laying the groundwork for trying to outweigh the opinions of Alito and Thomas, perhaps by adding four more Justices to the Supreme Court, he said.

“You may have 13 people on the Supreme Court after they get done and with it they will install a liberal majority,” DeSantis said, without pausing for the crowd to boo that prediction. “So they’re hard at this effort of trying to lay the groundwork for that by delegitimizing our great conservative Justices.

“And let me say, I stand with Justice Thomas, I stand with Justice Alito in the face of these attacks,” he continued. “They are wrong.”

Neither Justice has denied the trips. Thomas said he followed the advice of colleagues and others that “personal hospitality” gifts like the ones he took over two decades at Crow’s invitation did not have to be reported. And Alito took the unusual step of pre-empting another ProPublica story before it was released, in an op-ed written for the Wall Street Journal. Alito said he didn’t know his host was connected to cases before the Supreme Court, the inn he stayed at 15 years ago was “rustic,” and the seat he took on the plane to Alaska was going there with or without him.

Like all previous stump speeches, DeSantis shied away from direct attacks on the man who got bigger applause at the conference of prominent evangelicals: former President Donald Trump.