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.”

DeSantis, a Republican, suspended Warren, a twice-elected Democrat serving as state attorney near Tampa, from office in August 2022. Florida’s constitution permits the governor to suspend elected prosecutors only for specific reasons, like “neglect of duty” or “malfeasance.” So DeSantis issued an executive order claiming that he had dismissed the prosecutor for refusing to enforce criminal laws, including Florida’s bans on abortion and transgender health care. Warren responded with a federal lawsuit alleging that DeSantis had, in reality, targeted him because he had criticized the state bans, violating his First Amendment right to speak on a matter of public concern. At the time, the right-wing press panned his suit; National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, for instance, condemned it as “bogus,” “a joke” that “no responsible jurist” could support.

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U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, a Bill Clinton appointee, largely sided with Warren on the facts: The judge found that DeSantis directed his aides to find a “reform” prosecutor for him to suspend as a political statement; that those aides decided Warren would be a high-profile target based on his outspoken opposition to DeSantis’ agenda; and that they then crafted a pretext to justify Warren’s ouster.........

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