Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday said he would appoint Ashley Moody, his state’s attorney general, to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate.

DeSantis picks Florida attorney general to replace Marco Rubio in Senate

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Thursday said he would appoint Ashley Moody, his state’s attorney general, to replace Marco Rubio in the Senate.

 

Moody, 49, was elected to the state attorney general’s office in 2018, the same year DeSantis won the governor’s mansion, and has been a vocal defender of DeSantis’s policies and actions. President-elect Donald Trump is nominating Rubio for secretary of state, creating an opening for DeSantis to fill until an election in 2026.

DeSantis cast Moody as a staunch ally of Trump’s agenda and praised her as someone with a record of opposing undocumented immigration, “woke ideology” and the policies of President Joe Biden.

“She has stood strong time and time again,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Orlando.

Moody was considered the favorite to replace Rubio. Trump and his allies had advocated for Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who co-chaired the Republican National Committee this past election cycle — putting DeSantis in an awkward position. But DeSantis continued to signal interest in other candidates, and Trump said publicly last month that he did not expect DeSantis to pick her. Lara Trump said Dec. 21 that she was removing her name from consideration.

Moody previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Florida and became the youngest judge in Florida when she won election to the circuit court in Hillsborough County. She is a fifth-generation Floridian whose father and grandfather also served as judges.

Moody criticized “unelected bureaucrats” and “out-of-control federal agencies” in her own remarks and said she will support Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” initiative. She said she was excited to “shrink the bloat” of the federal government, echoing DeSantis’s statements that his pick must be committed to spending cuts.

“I will not let the citizens of Florida down, and I will not let my country down,” Moody said. She praised DeSantis’s leadership of Florida and finished her speech with Trump’s motto: “America first, let’s get it done.”

As state attorney general, Moody has aligned closely with DeSantis. Her office recently sued to keep an abortion rights amendment off the Florida ballot in November, and she also defended the state’s use of taxpayer dollars to advertise against the measure. The amendment, which DeSantis also opposed, was defeated. Moody also supported DeSantis’s controversial moves to use state funds to fly undocumented immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard and California to make a political point about immigration.

In 2020, Moody backed a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to block the election results after Joe Biden defeated Trump.

At Thursday’s news conference, DeSantis noted Moody’s support for his agenda, calling her a defender of “law and order” and noting her role in DeSantis’s removal of a Democratic prosecutor. In 2022, DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat, and replaced him with Suzy Lopez, a Republican.

“She has stood with us every step of the way,” DeSantis said.

Moody’s office filed a motion to shield DeSantis from being compelled to testify in a lawsuit Warren filed to get his job back. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit recently dismissed the case, declaring it was moot because Lopez defeated Warren in the November election.

Moody and her longtime friend Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick to be U.S. attorney general, were both part of Lopez’s investiture ceremony last week. DeSantis called the three women “a murderer’s row” of prosecutors.

Florida’s attorney general is elected independently from the governor, but Moody’s policies and pursuits have supported DeSantis’s agenda. In 2021, Moody’s office successfully sued the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove restrictions for the cruise ship industry at a time when the country was still grappling with the pandemic.

Moody’s office has also farmed out several high-profile cases to private law firms, many closely connected to the Republican Party, and paid them millions of dollars in legal fees. One of those was the lawsuit against the Stop Woke Act, one of DeSantis’s marquee policies, which restricted how private companies teach diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

The state agreed to pay $725,000 in legal fees in November to the businesses that successfully challenged part of the 2022 law.

In announcing Moody as his choice Thursday, DeSantis said Florida needs a U.S. Senator “to rid our institutions, federal agencies, universities, corporations of the pernicious woke ideology and woke agenda.”

Florida Democrats criticized the choice.

“Ashley Moody has been Ron’s personal lapdog from day one,” Florida Democratic Party Chair Nikki Fried said in a statement. “Despite her role as an independent constitutional officer, she has insisted on calling him ‘boss’ and defended his extreme agenda at every turn. Her reward is a seat in the United States Senate, paid for by her loyalty to Ron and her failure to serve Floridians.”

DeSantis also announced Thursday that he will select his chief of staff, James Uthmeier, 37, to take Moody’s place as attorney general. Uthmeier is considered one of DeSantis’s most loyal aides. He is a lawyer by training and worked for Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in the first Trump administration.

The Florida governor has shown immense trust in his top aide, tapping Uthmeier, who had little experience in campaigns, to audit and then manage his 2024 presidential operation after the effort struggled to gain traction.

Florida political analyst Susan MacManus said DeSantis’s choice of Moody to replace Rubio “makes a lot of sense” because of her experience in tackling issues championed by DeSantis, such as illegal immigration, and also her own interest in combating fentanyl sales and human trafficking.

“She’s well-versed in the legal dimensions of all these big, contentious public policies that are happening in Florida and elsewhere,” said MacManus, a politics professor emerita with the University of South Florida.

MacManus said the pick also makes sense for the Florida GOP, whose leaders are already considering who will run to replace a term-limited DeSantis in 2026.

In both 2018 and 2022, when Moody was elected to be attorney general and DeSantis governor, she garnered more votes than he did. Moody has for years been a regular guest on Fox News and other conservative outlets.

“Some Republicans have told me that she will probably have a smooth path to be elected to the Senate seat,” MacManus said. “She did really well the last time she ran. She got more votes than anybody.”