As expected, the new DeSantis-appointed board of supervisors has voted to invalidate agreements made by the prior board. Those agreements, made in February in the last days of the prior board’s existence, essentially handed all of the board’s power over to Disney in perpetuity. The new DeSantis-appointed board arrived on the scene only to find that it was powerless.

Lawyers hired by the new board suggested last week that Disney made some procedural errors which meant the last-minute agreement was in violation of Florida law. One lawyer compared Disney’s behavior to “a caper worthy of Scrooge McDuck.” Now it looks like that caper has been reversed.

A board appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida to oversee government services at Disney World voted on Wednesday to nullify two agreements that gave The Walt Disney Company vast control over expansion at the 25,000-acre resort complex.

The five-member board voted after its general counsel, Daniel Langley, presented evidence of what he called “self-dealing” and “procedural unconscionability” by Disney in pushing through the agreements earlier this year. Mr. Langley and another board lawyer said Disney violated Florida law in multiple ways, including by failing to fully notify the public of the actions it took.

“What they created is an absolute legal mess,” Martin Garcia, the board chairman, said of Disney during the meeting. “It will not work.”

CNN has more on the legal arguments made today prior to overturning the agreement made by the previous board:

In Wednesday’s meeting, the board’s special general counsel, Daniel Langley, walked through its legal argument for nullifying the deal between Disney and the previous board.

He said the board had not provided the required public notice of its meetings, and said the agreement was not properly approved by two municipalities within the district, the cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista.

He also argued that previous amendments to Disney’s long-term comprehensive plan were not properly vetted and approved by those two municipalities.

“The bottom line is that a development agreement has to be approved by the governing body of a jurisdiction, and that didn’t happen from the cities that have jurisdiction,” Langley said.

Former Florida Supreme Court justice Alan Lawson, an attorney hired by the district, said that “the old board attempted to act without legal authority to act.”

Will this hold up? Naturally, Disney has filed a lawsuit today to find out.

Disney is suing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) over what it called a “relentless campaign to weaponize government power,” escalating a long-running feud between the entertainment giant and the conservative governor.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida, accuses DeSantis of orchestrating a campaign to punish Disney over its political views. The lawsuit comes just one week after DeSantis pledged to work with the state legislature to roll back Disney’s corporate control over its Florida theme park.

The NY Times notes that the LA lawyer, Daniel M. Petrocelli, who filed the lawsuit for Disney is the same guy who defended Trump against a class action lawsuit aimed at Trump University.

This conflict is going to make for some strange bedfellows politically. On the one hand you have conservatives, who are always suspicious of government overreach and over-regulation rooting for a governor to seize regulatory control of a major company’s property. On the other hand you have progressives, who are always worried about the power and greed of big corporations, rooting for one of the biggest corporations in the US to effectively govern itself, with its own corporate lawyers literally writing the agreement to hand power to the company in perpetuity. This is a pretty weird situation for partisans on both sides.

And yet, a poll out today suggests this is working for DeSantis with Republicans even as Democrats who spent years repeating that “corporations aren’t people” suddenly seem to be big supporters of corporate speech.

Forty-four percent of Republican respondents in the two-day poll ended Tuesday said they had a more favorable view of DeSantis because of the fight with Disney, which led him to sign a retaliatory law in February that aims to strip the company of its self-governing authority at its Orlando-area parks…

Seventy-three percent of respondents – including 82% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans – said they were less likely to support a political candidate who backs laws designed to punish a company for its political or cultural stances.

Would Democrats still feel that way if the company in question was taking a conservative stance on abortion or gender-affirming-care? Alternatively, would Republicans still side with a governor making these sort of efforts against an openly conservative corporation in, say, California? I guess we’ll see if both sides stay put in these new positions as this battle between Disney and DeSantis grinds on.