WaPo:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has cast himself as the nation’s boldest and most aggressively conservative Republican leader, his eye on a 2022 reelection campaign and a potential presidential run two years later.

DeSantis last month introduced legislation that would allow parents to sue if schools taught critical race theory. He has sued the Biden administration for releasing immigration detainees in his state. And he has repeatedly championed his refusal to require mask-wearing, to mandate vaccines or topush for business closures throughout the pandemic.

It nonetheless shocked even fellow Florida Republicans when, in the midst of a pressure campaign from Donald Trump’s former senior adviser Stephen K. Bannon, DeSantis incited a redistricting battle with his own party, roping the state’s two legislative chambers intothe fray and asking the state’s highest court to pick sides.

Days before the Florida state Senate was to vote on new congressional district lines in January, DeSantis presenteda dramatically more partisan mapthat boosted Republican seats and eliminated a district where a plurality of voters are Black.

The state Senate ignored DeSantis’s last-minute appeal and passed its version, a mapthat received support from every Republican and all but four Democrats in the chamber.

DeSantis responded by asking the state Supreme Court to weigh in on whether his map’s erasure of the 5th Congressional District, where Black Democrats are advantaged, would withstand legal scrutiny. The move froze the state House’s redistricting work, which was set to begin soon after.

On Thursday, in a rare legal setback for DeSantis, the state Supreme Court rejected his request for an advisory opinion, saying the governor’s request was “broad and contains multiple questions that implicate complex federal and state constitutional matters and precedents interpreting the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”