DeSantis’ Rubio Replacement Seen as Trump Loyalist and MAGA Culture Warrior

thenewcivilrightsmovement.com:

selected Attorney General Ashley Moody to succeed U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, should Rubio be confirmed as Secretary of State.

Moody, 49, has served under Governor DeSantis for five years. If she chooses to remain in the Senate, she would need to run in a special election in 2026.Both Lara Trump and Matt Gaetz had been rumored at one time to be interested in consideration.

DeSantis’s wife, Casey DeSantis, had also been rumored as a possible replacement. Lara Trump announced she would not seek the appointment.

Some political observers suggested DeSantis, who is term limited and cannot run for a third term in 2026, could appoint himself to the role, but he announced he would not.As Florida’s Attorney General, Moody has taken an aggressive, right-wing stance on key cultural issues.In 2023, Moody appeared to compare a popular LGBTQ children’s book about gay penguins to “Nazi propaganda.”After citing “a new ruling in Russia that bans the LGBTQ movement,” MSNBC‘s Ja’han Jones wrote: “In Putinesque fashion, the Florida AG argued that because schools are able to ban Nazi propaganda under ‘value-based judgments,’ they should be allowed to make similar decisions about LGBTQ content.”READ MORE: Trump Ran on Promise to Lower Grocery Prices — Few Americans Now Believe He Will“In a legal brief filed over the summer,” Jones noted, Moody had “argued that schools’ homophobic book bans are constitutional because ‘public-school systems, including their libraries, convey the government’s message, and, when the government speaks, it may ‘regulate the content of … its own message.’ ‘”Moody “once sued Donald Trump for alleged fraud,” The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake reports.