When the U.S. Senate voted to confirm Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's former personal defense attorney, as Attorney General of the United States, it happened by the narrowest possible margin: 50 to 49. Two Republicans, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, broke ranks to vote no. Florida's own senators didn't.

Both of Florida's Republican senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, voted to put Blanche in charge of the nation's top law enforcement agency. Moody did more than vote. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, she personally introduced Blanche at his confirmation hearing, helping usher him toward the office. Scott publicly pressed colleagues to confirm him "NOW," calling him "exactly who we need."

That should stop you cold. Ashley Moody isn't a politician with no background in law enforcement. She spent six years, from 2019 to 2025, as Florida's own Attorney General. She knows exactly what independent law enforcement leadership is supposed to look like, and what it looks like when it's compromised. A former state AG, of all people, should have been the first to raise the alarm about installing a president's personal criminal defense lawyer atop the U.S. Department of Justice. Instead, she introduced him.

Who is Todd Blanche?

Before he was Attorney General, Blanche was the man who represented Donald Trump in his New York criminal hush-money case. He then moved directly into the Justice Department as the second-highest official, serving as Deputy Attorney General before being elevated to Acting Attorney General earlier this year. His confirmation fight was one of the most contentious of Trump's second term, not because Democrats alone objected, but because members of Blanche's own party raised concerns about his independence and his handling of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein. To get the votes he needed, Blanche reportedly agreed in writing to narrow a tax-immunity arrangement and end certain payments tied to the administration's "anti-weaponization" efforts.

In other words: a president's former personal lawyer, with unresolved questions about his independence from that same president, now runs the Department of Justice. Ashley Moody helped make that happen.

This is who Ashley Moody answers to

Moody was never elected to the U.S. Senate by Florida voters. She was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis in January 2025 to fill the seat Marco Rubio left behind when he joined the Trump administration. Before that, she was elected twice as Florida's Attorney General, the state's top law enforcement officer, a job built on the premise that prosecutors and justice officials answer to the law, not to whichever politician put them there.

That makes her vote to confirm Blanche harder to explain away, not easier. This isn't a lawmaker with no frame of reference for what's at stake. It's someone who ran the Florida Department of Legal Affairs and understood, better than almost anyone in the Senate, what it means to compromise a justice system's independence. She voted for Blanche anyway. Since arriving in Washington, her voting record has tracked closely with the White House's priorities, including supplying a decisive vote to install the president's own former attorney atop the Justice Department.

Now Florida voters get the choice Moody never had to earn: whether she keeps that seat past this November.

Meet Angie Nixon

Angie Nixon is a Jacksonville state representative, longtime union organizer, and mother of two who won the Democratic Senate nomination in a decisive primary upset, beating a better-funded, better-known opponent without taking corporate PAC money. She's spent her three terms in the Florida House pushing back against the state's Republican majority, including leading the floor fight against Florida Republicans' mid-decade congressional redistricting push.

Nixon's Senate campaign centers on lowering costs for working families: rent stabilization amid Florida's affordability crisis, expanding healthcare access, canceling medical debt, and universal childcare. She's talked openly about the experiences that shaped her politics: watching her mother work two jobs to make ends meet, attending Florida public schools, and losing a family member to gun violence.

Where Moody has aligned with an administration accused of consolidating power around personal loyalty over independence, Nixon has built her campaign on a simple contrast: government that answers to working people, not to billionaires, corporate donors, or party gatekeepers in either party.

The choice in November

Florida voters will decide between an appointed incumbent who helped confirm the president's own former lawyer to run the Justice Department, and a grassroots challenger who will stand up to that kind of concentration of power.

Miami-Dade Democrats: this is a race Democrats can win, and it starts with turning out. Vote out Ashley Moody. Vote for Angie Nixon.

Get involved with the Miami-Dade Democratic Party's efforts to elect Angie Nixon this November.

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