After 19 young children and two teachers were murdered in a massacre at an elementary school in his district last year, Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) joined a bipartisan effort to pass gun control legislation that expanded criminal background checks and banned some domestic abusers from purchasing guns.

His home state Republican Party is now punishing him for it.

Republicans in Florida’s GOP-dominated state legislature are using the next legislative session that starts March 7 to do their Republican governor’s 2024 bidding on a number of fronts.

State lawmakers plan to propose a bunch of bills that will not only further DeSantis’ ongoing “anti-woke” agenda, but also score him the kind of headlines he needs to continue pulling Trump supporters into his corner ahead of a 2024 campaign launch, which is expected to happen once the state legislature wraps up this new legislative session in May. DeSantis has remained rather coy about the timing of the whole thing, telling “Fox and Friends” last month that he’ll make up his mind about a bid after the session ends. It’s all pretty convenient.

The degree to which the legislature is beholden to DeSantis’ political objectives was apparent several times in the last year, as it passed bills that attack “wokeness” and diversity and voting rights and Florida’s LGBTQ community. The bills sparked outrage, and DeSantis made the kinds of national headlines he can use to cast himself as a suitably aggressive successor to Trump. Lather, rinse, repeat.

While it’s been clear ever since Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the creation of his political-stunt election-crimes task force almost a year ago that the entire endeavor was designed to curry favor with voters who are all-in on election denialism, we’ve been tracking what’s come out of each of the “voter fraud” cases rather closely.

Nearly every single one of the cases tried thus far have gone nowhere, adding to the rather solid hypothesis that the arrests and creation of the task force were all done in service of DeSantis and his 2024 bid — which he hasn’t yet announced.

Donald Trump’s daughter and son-in-law have been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith to appear before a federal grand jury for testimony. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Michael Schmidt have the latest here.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were reportedly both compelled to share testimony on Trump’s various schemes to stay in the White House after he lost the election to President Biden in 2020 and his role in siccing a mob of his supporters attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

The Washington Post obtained a copy of a new bankruptcy filing that reveals some bizarre information about conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ personal finances, but this nugget takes the cake.

In the disclosures, which you can read in full here, Jones declared that he is “holding firearms” for some of the people who participated in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Shortly after the midterm elections, when Republicans barely seized a majority in the House and lost the Senate, GOPers started making noises about reversing course on the party’s years-long battle with mail-in voting. The about-face seemed specifically tied to Herschel Walker’s Senate defeat in Georgia, where just a year prior Republicans passed a handful of voting restrictions post-2020, one of which was focused on making it harder to vote by mail.

Alternate headline: Florida State GOPers Are Legislating DeSantis’ 2024 Bid Into Existence

As I was editing my colleague Kaila Philo’s piece here today on the College Board’s biting response to the DeSantis administration’s “PR stunt,” this bit struck me:

“They provided these AP courses for a long time, but you know, there are probably some other vendors who may be able to do that job as good or even a lot better,” the governor said at a news conference in Naples, Florida. He also said that he’s spoken with Florida House Speaker Paul Renner about potential legislation to “re-evaluate how Florida’s doing that.”

It’s been clear for some time that Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is using his constituents as pawns and his gubernatorial powers as props to prep his national image for a 2024 bid.

While each of his various policy proposals and attacks on public education, people of color, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, the media, etc. have been projected as the hardline governor’s humble war on woke-ism in his state, he knows quite well how to appeal to the MAGA crowd. And he’s been using his tenure as governor to boost his national relevance ahead of what is shaping up to be a nasty GOP primary.

And Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) is following his lead.

I will preface this by saying that it appears the issue has been resolved BUT for at least a few of the last 24 hours, Democrats held a supermajority on the subcommittee that Jim Jordan created to, essentially, find out what dirt the DOJ has on him.

That’s a bit reductive but not untrue. Here’s what happened:

Late last year we reported on a few surprising developments in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s inquiry into Donald Trump — developments that signaled Bragg was breathing new life into his office’s criminal probe of Trump that, up until that point, appeared to have stalled out.