The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, announced he is appointing Ashley Moody, the state’s attorney general, to fill Marco Rubio’s Senate seat. Rubio is Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of state.
Moody has been Florida’s attorney general since 2019, having replaced Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for US attorney general. Rubio had been in the Senate since 2011 as part of the Tea Party wave during the 2010 election.
Over the last five years, Moody has defended DeSantis’s conservative agenda, including successfully stopping federal pandemic rules in 2021, blocking the federal government from releasing migrants into the country and halting a federal rule on background checks at gun shows. She has sued the Biden administration nine times since 2023, according to the Miami Herald.
At a press conference on Thursday, Moody promised to reign in “out of control federal agencies” and to cut spending.
“I’m ready to show up and fight for this nation and fight for President Trump to deliver the ‘America first’ agenda on day one,” Moody said during Thursday’s announcement at a hotel in Orlando.
DeSantis said on Thursday Moody has a “demonstrated record of delivering results”.
“I’m happy to say we’ve had an attorney general that is somebody that has acted time and time again to support the values that we all share,” DeSantis said.
Though Moody was at the top of the list of who DeSantis would appoint to fill Rubio’s seat, Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law and former Republican National Committee chair was reportedly also in the running, until she publicly dropped out of consideration.
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“The only person that Donald Trump wanted to see [in the seat] was probably me,” Lara Trump told the Daily Mail, explaining his reaction when she told him.
Moody will be in the position until the seat is up again in 2026. She will likely be up against challengers in the primary, including the US representative Cory Mills, a Republican who recently said he will run for the seat in 2026.
DeSantis has the power to appoint a new person to fill the vacant Florida attorney general role. A top pick is James Uthmeier, DeSantis’s current chief of staff, according to Axios.
As Trump enters office, Republicans control both chambers of Congress by a slim margin. Republicans have 53 seats in the Senate out of 100, with vice-president JD Vance as a tie-breaking vote if needed, and 200 seats out of 435 in the House.