When President Trump was asked about federal appeals court judge Barbara Lagoa as a potential Supreme Court justice, he was quick to home in on one of the big benefits she brings in an election year.
“I’ve heard incredible things about her. I don’t know her,” he told reporters at the White House over the weekend. “She’s Hispanic and highly respected,” he said, then adding, “Miami.”
Pundits and bookmakers have installed her as the second favorite behind Amy Coney Barrett, whose Catholic faith and anti-abortion credentials make her a darling of conservatives.
But when almost all of Trump’s roads to reelection lead through Florida, insiders are urging him to consider the electoral benefits of picking the daughter of Cuban immigrants who rose to become the first Hispanic woman to serve on the battleground state’s top court.
Carl Tobias, a constitutional law professor at the University of Richmond, said her main drawback was spending less than a year on the federal bench. At the same time, she would likely be more easily confirmed than Barrett, and it fits Trump’s efforts to woo the Hispanic vote in Florida.
“For people in that community, and there are many in Florida, it might be valuable, and certainly he’s making a play for that vote,” he said.
The result is that Trump has asked his aides for more information on the 52-year-old mother of three, according to a source familiar with discussions.
Her elevation to become the second Latina on the Supreme Court would crown a dizzying rise. She was only last year appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, which hears cases from Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. And that came months after she was nominated to the Florida Supreme Court by close Trump ally Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Her parents fled Castro’s Cuba after the communist revolution, and she grew up in Hialeah, an almost entirely Hispanic city just outside of Miami. She graduated from Florida International University before receiving her law degree from Columbia University.
Her first brush with the big time came in 2000 when she offered pro bono legal services to relatives of Elian Gonzalez in the United States. The 5-year-old had been rescued from the ocean after his mother drowned while escaping from Cuba, but his father demanded that he be returned to the communist nation.
The result was a major diplomatic tussle between the U.S. and Cuba, which ended when the boy was sent home.
Last year, she described how her parents’ experience informed her outlook.
“In the country my parents fled, the whim of a single individual could mean the difference between food or hunger, liberty or prison, life or death,” she said. “Unlike the country my parents fled, we are a nation of laws, not of men.”
Like all the judges being considered by Trump, she is considered an “originalist,” preferring a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution that stays close to its literal text. And she is a member of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group that has worked closely with Trump on appointing judges. Both Trump’s Supreme Court nominees so far, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, are members.
Although she has only been on the federal bench since last year, she has delivered a number of rulings in line with Trump administration views.
She was part of a major opinion that upheld a law preventing former prisoners with serious criminal convictions from voting unless they pay outstanding court fees and fines. In so doing, she helped reverse a lower court’s decision that the law was an infringement of felons’ rights and an attempt to prevent minorities from voting.
During her time on the Florida Supreme Court, she also upheld DeSantis’s authority to suspend the sheriff of Broward County. The sheriff was heavily criticized in the wake of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
In so doing, she sided with the Trump administration and its views on the limits of judicial reach, essentially agreeing that the executive branch has broad authority to dismiss employees.
Even so, she is likely to face an easier confirmation process than Barrett. She has a shorter federal record, with fewer contentious rulings than Barrett for Democrats to challenge.
And her confirmation vote for the 11th Circuit last year went 80-15, said Tobias.
“Given her strong vote, given her smooth hearing, given her record — and the state cases she had would typically not be hot-button issues, she wouldn’t see the culture war issues that can sink a candidate — there is less of a problem for her,” he said.
