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Matt Davenport

@mattdavenport.bsky.social
218 followers 127 following 32 posts

UMN Law Student, opinion are solely my own, “Be true to whom you wish to become.”

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Reposted by Matt Davenport
WIRED @wired.com · 15/07/2025
NEW: Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”
wired.com
The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out
Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 10/07/2025
New in PN: The worst chief justice of all time "American history has no shortage of legendarily bad chief justices and disgraceful decisions. But John Roberts has overseen the wholesale corruption and capture of the Supreme Court, and history should look back on his tenure with revulsion."
publicnotice.co
The worst chief justice of all time
Move over, Roger Taney and Melville Fuller.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 08/07/2025
my view is that everyone should be able to earn a living wage doing whatever it is they like. if you love working in a bookshop, you should be able to live a comfortable life doing so. if you loving being a barista, the same. and if you want to do more traditional blue collar work, that’s cool too!
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 08/07/2025
the other thing is that no one who fetishizes manual labor actually cares to improve life for people who are in those circumstances! no support for unionization or a generous welfare state! no interest in policies that make life easier for people who work their hands or afford them more autonomy!
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Wajahat Ali @wajali.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
The GOP has cut Medicaid, but found money for ICE, which now has a bigger budget than the militaries of most foreign countries. No schools, but more private prisons and concentration camps for US citizens and immigrants.
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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez @aoc.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.
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Taniel @taniel.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
$171 billion of new funding for immigration enforcement. that's $45 billion to fund more detention centers $14 billion to fund state + local law forces collaborating $30 billion more for ICE staggering, gigantic figures in the bill that Congress just passed boltsmag.org/how-the-gop-...
boltsmag.org
How the GOP Megabill Would Turbocharge Local Immigration Enforcement - Bolts
Congress is poised to pour tens of billions of dollars into more immigration detention, private jails, and border operations, plus new ICE partnerships with local police and sheriffs.
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · 03/07/2025
With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined.
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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 02/07/2025
Think about how insane this is. I know we normalize every abnormal thing Trump does, & he floods the zone & numbs us, but a leading media organizing rolling over & agreeing to pay $16m to the president because he didn’t like how they edited an interview?? What country is this?
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 01/07/2025
Q: Are you saying that the estimated 11.8m who could lose their coverage, that's all waste fraud & abuse? TRUMP: I'm saying it's gonna be a very much smaller number than that, & that number will be waste fraud & abuse Q: What number? T: I'm not seeing a number but I know it's much less than that
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 01/07/2025
Trump calls for deporting US citizens: "We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time ... many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job."
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The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 01/07/2025
Breaking news: The Senate narrowly approved President Trump's massive tax and immigration bill, extending tax cuts for wealthy Americans and cutting nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, SNAP and other programs. wapo.st/4esoFbg
wapo.st
Senate passes Trump’s tax bill, sending it to House for final passage
The legislation extends trillions of dollars in tax cuts from Trump’s first term and implements new campaign promises, while spending billions on immigration.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 01/07/2025
darkly funny that the big innovative idea of the new populist right is, uh, scream about brown people and use the power you win to give money to rich people
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The Washington Post @washingtonpost.com · 01/07/2025
Funding cuts to USAID by the Trump administration could lead to more than 14 million additional deaths globally over the next five years, according to a new study.
washingtonpost.com
USAID cuts may cause 14 million more deaths in next five years, study says
The analysis, published in the Lancet, estimates the agency’s programs saved 91 million lives worldwide over two decades, playing a vital role in global health.
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Joshua Erlich @joshuaerlich.bsky.social · 29/06/2025
this is a guy you want in the tent and anyone who says otherwise should find themselves on the outside looking in
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 27/06/2025
there is no jurisprudence at work here. the republican court believes that anything a republican president is presumptively constitutional, even if it directly violates the unambiguous constitutional text and causes total chaos in law and policy.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 27/06/2025
as for the upshot of the decision, the republican court has put the citizen children of non-citizens in a position similar to that of free blacks during the antebellum period. their right to enjoy the privileges and immunities of american citizenship will vary according to state borders
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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 27/06/2025
I want to reiterate that countless conservative judges issued universal injunctions against the Biden administration, and the Supreme Court never halted the practice. Now, barely five months into Trump's second term, the court puts an end to these injunctions. A brazen double standard.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 27/06/2025
it is the Imperial Judiciary when courts say that presidents can’t unilaterally overturn constitutional text, and the Proper Order of Things when courts say that your rights rest on the whims of who happens to be in office
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🎃 Imani Gandy Corn 🎃 @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 27/06/2025
Here’s Justice Jackson “yes and-ing” what Sotomayor said and dissenting “with deep disillusionment”:
Screenshot reading: 

JUSTICE JACKSON, dissenting.
I agree with every word of JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR's dissent.
I write separately to emphasize a key conceptual point: The Court's decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.
It is important to recognize that the Executive's bid to vanquish so-called "universal injunctions" is, at bottom, a request for this Court's permission to engage in unlawful behavior. When the Government says "do not allow the lower courts to enjoin executive action universally as a remedy for unconstitutional conduct," what it is actually sayingScreenshot reading:

is that the Executive wants to continue doing something that a court has determined violates the Constitution-please allow this. That is some solicitation. With its ruling today, the majority largely grants the Government's wish.
But, in my view, if this country is going to persist as a Nation of laws and not men, the Judiciary has no choice but to deny it.
Stated simply, what it means to have a system of government that is bounded by law is that everyone is constrained by the law, no exceptions. And for that to actually happen, courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive to follow the law—full stop. To conclude otherwise is to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law's protection become subject to the Executive's whims instead.
The majority cannot deny that our Constitution was designed to split the powers of a monarch between the governing branches to protect the People. Nor is it debatable that the role of the Judiciary in our constitutional scheme is to ensure fidelity to law. But these core values are strangely absent from today's decision. Focusing on inapt comparisons to impotent English tribunals, the majority ignores the Judiciary's foundational duty to uphold the Constitution and laws of the United States. The majority's ruling thus not only diverges from first principles, it is also profoundly dangerous, since it gives the Executive the go-ahead to sometimes wield the kind of unchecked, arbitrary power the Founders crafted our Constitution to eradicate. The very institution our founding charter charges with the duty to ensure universal adherence to the law now requires judges to shrug and turn their backs to intermittent lawlessness.
With deep disillusionment, I dissent.
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🎃 Imani Gandy Corn 🎃 @angryblacklady.blacksky.app · 27/06/2025
6-3 in favor of Trump in the birthright citizenship case— which at this stage was only about about nationwide injunctions. But Sotomayor brings it back to what this is really about—letting Trump get away with lawlessness. Her dissent is another banger which she is reading from the bench:
Screenshot readin: 
JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR, with whom JUSTICE KAGAN and
JUSTICE JACKSON join, dissenting.
Children born in the United States and subject to its laws are United States citizens. That has been the legal rule since the founding, and it was the English rule well before then. This Court once attempted to repudiate it, holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857), that the children of enslaved black Americans were not citizens.
To
remedy that grievous error, the States passed in 1866 and Congress ratified in 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, which enshrined birthright citizenship in
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the Constitution. There it has remained, accepted and respected by Congress, by the Executive, and by this Court.
Until today.
It is now the President who attempts, in an Executive Order (Order or Citizenship Order), to repudiate birthright citizenship. Every court to evaluate the Order has deemed it patently unconstitutional and, for that reason, has enjoined the Federal Government from enforcing it. Unde-terred, the Government now asks this Court to grant emergency relief, insisting it will suffer irreparable harm unless it can deprive at least some children born in the United States of citizenship.
See Protecting the Meaning and
Value of American Citizenship, Exec. Order No. 14160, 90
Fed. Reg. 8849 (2025).
The Government does not ask for complete stays of the injunctions, as it ordinarily does before this Court. Why?
The answer is obvious: To get such relief, the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution's text, his-tory, this Court's precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice. So the Government instead tries its hand at a different game. It asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone. Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.
The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along. A majority of this Court decides that these applications, of all cases, provide the appropriate occasion to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all. In its rush to do so the Court disregards basic principles of equity as well as the long history of injunctive relief granted to non-partes
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No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.
Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law-abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship. The majority holds that, absent cumbersome class-action litigation, courts cannot completely enjoin even such plainly unlawful policies unless doing so is necessary to afford the formal parties complete relief.
That holding renders constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only for any individuals who are not parties to a lawsuit.
Because I will not be complicit in so grave an at-
tack on our system of law, I dissent.
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Chris Hayes @chrislhayes.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
Just to be crystal clear: bombing Iran is completely illegal.
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David Noll @david.noll.org · 21/06/2025
the takeaway from this is that, for all practical purposes, stephen miller is the acting president of the united states. trump is just play-acting as the boss, as he did on the Apprentice. (gift link) www.wsj.com/politics/pol...
wsj.com
Stephen Miller’s Fingerprints Are on Everything in Trump’s Second Term
The president ’s deputy chief of staff has played an outsize role in immigration—and amassed more power than almost anyone else at the White House.
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Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
Don't just say it's unconstitutional, remind people that the constitution is full of very good ideas designed to prevent authoritarianism, and most people who want to ignore it want that specifically because they are authoritarian.
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Mina Kimes @minakimes.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Musk should be asked about this in every interview he does now and forever. To ignore it is a dereliction of duty. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/o...
There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk’s foray into politics accomplished.
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Rachel Maddow @maddow.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
www.axios.com/2025/04/29/p...
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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 30/04/2025
To be clear, nothing - NOTHING - Joe Biden said 4 years, including his debate meltdown, comes anywhere close to the insanity, unreality, unhingeness, of Trump repeatedly insisting - even when the interviewer is letting his crazy lie pass - that it was a real image of his knuckles
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 25/04/2025
recent polling is just a total repudiation of the idea that full spectrum opposition to trump across every area was/is a bad idea
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 23/04/2025
there really is no alternative to tearing up CBP and ICE root and branch
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James Fallows @jfallows.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
Almost every line of this story would have been simply unbelievable a few months ago: —Pioneering cancer researcher; —*Arrested* at airport in Boston; —Now indefinite ICE detention in Louisiana; —"Crime": not declaring some frog-embryo samples for research. Read it. www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...
nbcnews.com
New images could change cancer diagnostics, but ICE detained the Harvard scientist who analyzes them
Without scientist Kseniia Petrova’s expertise, no one can fully unlock the data’s potential, putting crucial advancements in early cancer detection at risk.
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Adrienne LaFrance @adriennelaf.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
I got lots of advice, some very specific. But one thing I heard again and again: America, you are running out of time. Here is what I learned: www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...
theatlantic.com
A Ticking Clock on American Freedom
Autocracy is no longer something that happens only in other countries.
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Mark Joseph Stern @mjsdc.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
Can district courts order the executive branch to engage in specific acts of diplomatic negotiation? If SCOTUS doesn’t think so now, why did it let Matthew Kacsmaryk force U.S. diplomats to negotiate the revival of a Trump border policy in 2021 after Biden tried to end it? slate.com/news-and-pol...
Texas and Missouri filed suit in 2021, claiming the program's disbandment was unlawfully
"arbitrary and capricious." They shopped their complaint to the federal court in Amarillo, Texas, where they were guaranteed to draw Kacsmaryk, an ultra-partisan Trump appointee (who would later attempt to ban mifepristone medication abortion nationwide). To nobody's surprise, Kacsmaryk sided with Texas, issuing a nationwide injunction that forced the
government to restart Remain in Mexico almost immediately. Biden's Justice Department promptly begged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to freeze Kacsmaryk's injunction, providing ample evidence that his order would
"significantly harm our diplomatic relationships" and mandate complex "diplomatic engagement" with foreign sovereigns. The 5th Circuit refused a stay, blowing off these concerns in one brusque paragraph. Any harm to Biden's foreign policy agenda, it asserted, was "self-inflicted," because the government should have "simply inform[ed] Mexico" that terminating the program "would be subject to judicial review."The Justice Department then asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief.
Kacsmaryk's decision, it wrote, "imposes a severe and unwarranted burden on executive authority over immigration policy and foreign affairs." His injunction, DOJ wrote, wrested control of foreign policy "by requiring it to immediately negotiate with Mexico to reinstate" a dormant program- "effectively dictating the content of the United States' negotiations with foreign sovereigns." It marked nothing less than a grievous "intrusion into the executive's management of foreign policy," encroaching upon the core of his "constitutional authority."
SCOTUS didn't care. By a 6-3 vote, the Supreme Court refused to grant a stay; its bare-bones, one-paragraph order did not even address Kacsmaryk's interference with the president's power over international relations. All three liberal justices dissented.
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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 16/04/2025
They're not fascists, they just think we're in a state of exception due to the pollution of the polity and citizen body by undesirable racial elements whose removal is of such paramount importance that it transcends the dictates of the law, justified by their embodiment of the Will of the People.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 16/04/2025
vance is a detestable liar and an open enemy of the constitution. the central load bearing factual claim here is completely false and even if it wasn’t the constitution contains two explicit guarantees of due process
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Phillip Anderson @phillipanderson.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
There’s just so much shady shit in this story, but this really sticks out. Folks in NLRB’s IT unit were so freaked out by what they saw DOGE doing that they wanted to notify the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Then this happened:
The new revelations about DOGE's activities at the labor agency come from a whistleblower in the IT department of the NLRB, who disclosed his concerns to Congress and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel in a detailed report that was then provided to NPR. Meanwhile, his attempts to raise concerns internally within the NLRB preceded someone "physically taping a threatening note" to his door that included sensitive personal information and overhead photos of him walking his dog that appeared to be taken with a drone, according to a cover letter attached to his disclosure filed by his attorney, Andrew Bakaj of the nonprofit Whistleblower Aid.
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Sylvia at Tono Latino @tonolatino.bsky.social · 15/04/2025
Kilmar Abrego Garcia lived in Maryland with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime. The Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice.
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Jonathan Cohn @jonathancohn.bsky.social · 13/04/2025
The bipartisan belief that America would be a better place if *other people* worked in a factory. www.ft.com/content/8459...
80+% of both Democrats and Republicans believe America would be better off if more Americans worked in manufacturing, but < 30% say that about themselves.
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David Slack @slack2thefuture.bsky.social · 08/04/2025
Kidnapping. Capturing a person against their will without due process is called kidnapping. Transporting them to another country without due process is called human trafficking. A squalid extrajudicial prison for people found guilty of no crime is called a concentration camp.
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Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
Good morning. Today is the 80th day that the U.S. President is running a backdoor bribery scheme in which any CEO or foreign oligarch can send him money secretly through his crypto coin scam in exchange for favors. It's the biggest scandal in the history of the Presidency.
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Joyce White Vance @joycewhitevance.bsky.social · 09/04/2025
I still can’t figure out when “we can deport you” turned into “we can put you in a hell hole prison in a third country, indefinitely, with no legal recourse.”
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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
For the better part of the last decade, a great many people have tried really hard to make Donald Trump make sense in some broader political and historical context. But at the end of the day he's exactly what he appears to be: a rich psycho who's failed at everything in life except self-promotion.
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Patrick Wyman @patrickwyman.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
Really and truly, if I could communicate anything about history it's that genuine dumbasses can be key historical agents, and that has pretty massive implications for how we make sense of the past and present both.
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Hank Green @hankgreen.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
A tricky thing about modern society is that no one has any idea when they don’t die. Like, the number of lives saved by controlling air pollution in America is probably over 200,000 per year, but the number of people who think their life was saved by controlling air pollution is zero.
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60 Minutes @60minutes.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
60 Minutes found no criminal record for 75% of the Venezuelan migrants the U.S. sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. cbsn.ws/4lC4Vp5
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Ben Wikler @benwikler.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
The simple truth is that Trump believes that, if we send money to a county in exchange for stuff, we've just lost because now they have our money
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Nikki McCann Ramírez @nikkimcr.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
what a visual
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Mehdi Hasan @mehdirhasan.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
Republicans went nuts and accused Biden of tyranny when he tried to cancel student debt. Right now, their guy just imposed the biggest tax rise on Americans in modern history by fiat, unilaterally, with no congressional or judicial approval.
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Ben Collins @bencollins.bsky.social · 03/04/2025
I'm watching CNBC. These anchors are so angry. They really didn't believe he'd do it. They're actually just now, 10 years into this shit, realizing he's a maniac hellbent on revenge and there's no grand plan for the markets. Better late than never but holy shit.
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