WaPo: “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.
More recently, two justices appointed by past Republicans stepped down and took morelucrative jobs with allies of the governor, allowing DeSantis to handpick his own stalwarts.
The governor’s efforts have yielded one of the most conservative state Supreme Courts in the country, reflecting Florida’s shift from a politically competitive state to a testing ground for culture war legislation over immigration, race and sex education that is now at the heart of DeSantis’s presidential bid.”