Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis faced a sharp, surprising rebuke from a conservative appeals court on Wednesday.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis faced a sharp, surprising rebuke from a conservative appeals court on Wednesday, which dealt him a major setback in his quest to banish state prosecutor Andrew Warren from office. In fact, “setback” may be too mild a term: DeSantis got smoked at the court, which effectively accused him of abusing his office to punish Warren on the basis of protected speech. Most surprisingly, the governor’s harshest critic was Judge Kevin Newsom, a staunchly conservative Donald Trump appointee who went out of his way to charge DeSantis with an unconstitutional assault on “representative democracy.”