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Matt Ford

@mford.bsky.social
52K followers 608 following 2.8K posts

Staff writer, The New Republic. Law, democracy, and the courts. 49ers/Dodgers stuff too.

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Reposted by Matt Ford
George Pearkes @peark.es · 4h
*VATICAN SAYS POPE LEO XIV HAS LUNG CANCER: AP
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Gabriel Malor @gabrielmalor.bsky.social · 8h
8th Cir. holds that it violated clearly established law for state trial judge to order two children locked in the courthouse jail after they refused to leave the courthouse with their mother who had just won primary custody following a divorce. No QI for judge. ecf.ca8.uscourts.gov/opndir/26/10...
We have no doubt that Judge Eighmy believed he was acting in “good faith,” and possibly even in the children’s best interests, by detaining them.  But good faith in the Fourth Amendment context is about reasonable reliance, either on binding appellate precedent or a warrant issued by a “neutral magistrate.”  Wheeler v. City of Searcy, 14 F.4th 843, 852 (8th Cir. 2021) (quoting Messerschmidt v. Millender, 565 U.S. 535, 546 (2012)); see generally Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229 (2011).  Neither was present here.  No case allows a judge to detain children in a holding cell when they refuse to leave with a parent.  And a custody plan is no substitute for a warrant.  See Rockett, 71 F.4th at 672 (explaining that in Missouri, a custody plan allows a judge to issue a pick-up order); Mo. Rev. Stat. § 452.885 (outlining the process for getting one).  In short, rough justice does not trump the Constitution.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 23h
A vintage take of mine: Wild Wild West was the most accurate depiction of Reconstruction in American cinema until recently.
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Luke O'Neil @lukeoneil47.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
This is very sad. A very important part of one of the best series of all time and by all accounts a good advocate disability rights.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 12/10/2026
Never in doubt!
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 11/10/2026
Greetings from America’s Game of the Week
Go 49ers
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Eric Umansky @ericumansky.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
And the five-year-old boy who was in the car? His mom says he's "traumatized" and hasn't spoken since the shooting. www.nytimes.com/2026/10/09/n...
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Adam Serwer @adamserwer.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
The right wing crash out over asian students celebrating at a UT football game reveals that all along the true goal of reactionary colorblindness was never “meritocracy” but resegregation. (Gift link) www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/1...
Color-blind meritocracy was, for many years, a successful rhetorical strategy for undermining antidiscrimination law and excluding Black people from selective schools and prominent positions. That’s why so many former segregationists seemed to suddenly embrace the concept in the 1970s. For them, resegregation—not color-blindness—was always the goal. As long as the success of some immigrants could be used to paint Black students as undeserving, color-blind meritocracy was good. But now many on the right see a new problem: too many Asian Americans in elite spaces. Their success, therefore, must be portrayed as a sinister theft of real (white) Americans’ birthright.

The declining “social trust” that the administration warned against is, of course, not the fault of these students. The problem is bigots like Bo French who cannot accept into their community people who do not share their race and religion, and those who monetize or otherwise profit from that bigotry by spreading it through social media. Like the proverbial child who kills their parents and asks for mercy as an orphan, they are responsible for the problem they are decrying.
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Zeddy @zeddary.bsky.social · 09/10/2026
Weird coincidence he sanctions the ICC on the same day he gets a very, totally real trade deal with a dictator wanted by the ICC.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 10/10/2026
It’s like the nation’s top rapists and abusers all unionized.
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Senator Sheldon Whitehouse @whitehouse.senate.gov · 09/10/2026
Putin throws lifeline to try to save Trump in the midterms. In return, American dollars go to Russia and get put toward killing innocent Ukrainians. Trump/Russia right out in the open. www.dailymail.com/news/article...
dailymail.com
Putin throws Trump midterm lifeline as Russia agrees to supply diesel
Donald Trump announced today that Vladimir Putin has agreed to supply the US with hundreds of thousands of tons of diesel.
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Jack Jenkins @jackjenkins.me · 09/10/2026
NEW from me: The National Association of Evangelicals (along with several other religious groups) are now joining the USCCB in condemning Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth’s plans to publicly execute Nidal Malik Hasan, also saying doing so promotes a “culture of death.” religionnews.com/2026/10/09/h...
Walter Kim, president of the National
Association of Evangelicals, told RNS that while he affirms the "need for justice" regarding Hasan's crime, "at the same time, a live-streamed execution by firing squad risks turning one of the state's most solemn responsibilities into a public spectacle, promoting a culture of death, rather than a culture that upholds the dignity of every human being."
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tinybaby @tiny.baby · 09/10/2026
just getting lazy now. "the ai is uh. going to do something bad soon"
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 09/10/2026
Trump: "In 1900 we had really strong laws. Today you can do almost anything. Nothing happens."
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Yep. They find it intoxicating and look for opportunities to do it. Trump was always like this, but nobody else in his first term got a thrill out of it. Hegseth is perfectly suited for him.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The lynching comparisons are salient, but my first thought was abusers. This is an administration that is weak and badly losing a war and wants to hurt someone to feel strong again, especially if they can’t fight back.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Only 21st century example I can think of is the Islamic State’s beheadings.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
A push alert that took my breath away. 56 years old.
nytimes.com
Curtis Flowers Has Died at 56. His Case Became a Symbol of Racial Bias.
A white district attorney tried Mr. Flowers six times for the same murder, always ensuring that few or no Black people were on the juries.
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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 08/10/2026
the funny thing about this of course is that "athenian democracy" was a cautionary tale to the framers, who saw it as unstable and prone to demagogues and tyrants like the one rubio works for
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Did the Atlanta crowd just boo Acuña?
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Wait, second best. The Clase swing made it into a federal indictment.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
The best plate appearance of Andy Pages’s career so far.
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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 08/10/2026
Margaret Hamilton, who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software for the Apollo missions, has died.
nyti.ms
Margaret Hamilton, Whose Software Guided the Apollo Missions, Has Died
Margaret Hamilton, the first female programmer hired to work on the space project at M.I.T., was 90.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Robert E. Lee after Chancellorsville:
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LSM @slukemorgan.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
My take on the Court's actions last week and the necessity of jurisdiction-stripping in response:
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Eddy Conroy @econroy.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Insane. These jobs typically have a hundred or more applicants for every open role.
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Sam Bagenstos @sbagen.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The Russian pneumonia case underscores “that at a time when we need strong systems capable of detecting biological threats around the world, the United States is weakening parts of its own public health and scientific infrastructure.” www.statnews.com/2026/10/06/r... via @statnews.com
statnews.com
Infectious disease expert: The mysterious pneumonia in Russia deserves attention, not panic
Chill out about reports about plague in Siberia, writes infectious disease doctor Krutika Kuppalli.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Surely there must be one sports desk left in America that can afford to send a reporter to a Trappist monastery for their thoughts on the Padres/Brewers series.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Okay now it’s funny again
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
This post is much less funny now than it was eight minutes ago.
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Keri Blakinger @keribla.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The federal prison union is asking a judge to hold the BOP in contempt bc they say the agency ignored the court order to reinstate the union contract - and some of the things they're alleging in this motion are WILD
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Russiagate was a theory in the same way that gravity is a theory.
nytimes.com
Amid Midterm Crunch, Trump Advisers Took Time to Help Russia-Aligned Government
James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are leading the president’s congressional campaign operation, traveled to Republika Srpska to provide election advice.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
Kiké “Reggie Jackson” Hernandez
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Dan Lyons @danlyons.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Has to be BYU
Michael Wilbon on “Pardon The Interruption” with the displayed question “Most impressive LDS team thus far?”
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Steven Hale @iamstevenhale.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
In a release to media, Christa Pike’s attorneys say she is now “conscious and speaking” almost a week after the state of Tennessee failed to execute her by lethal injection.
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Steve Vladeck @stevevladeck.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Justice Alito devotes an entire chapter of his new book to the emergency docket—and to responding to people like me (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”). As I explain over at “One First,” it … didn’t go well: www.stevevladeck.com/p/256-so-une...
In the pre-publication galleys to his new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, Justice Alito spelled my last name inconsistently. This is, I suspect, the pettiest possible point on which to open in discussing a Supreme Court justice’s new memoir, and I would never have mentioned it except for the fact that inconsistency turns out to be the organizing feature of the chapter in which I (“the most prolific academic critic of the emergency docket”) repeatedly appear.The central inconsistency of Chapter 8, which is devoted to the emergency docket, is structural: Rather than tackle the subject holistically (as one might expect in a book), Alito mashed together the speech he gave five years ago at Notre Dame Law School with a “postscript.” The former was deeply flawed even at the time (among lots of other things, Alito repeatedly insisted that there was “nothing new” about the Court’s behavior on emergency applications during the first Trump administration and COVID); and the latter tries to move the goalposts away from the specific phenomena to which critics like me have actually objected.The result is to leave readers with a disjointed, inaccurate, and misleading sense of what the debate is even about—to say nothing of how the Court’s own behavior since September 2021 (including Alito’s) has only further undermined the already-flawed claims Alito made back then. Somewhere between the galleys of Alito’s book and the final product (which hits bookstores today), someone apparently figured out that my last name should be spelled the same way (and correctly!) throughout. The other, more significant inconsistencies were, apparently, harder to fix.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Trump and Hegseth plan to carry out the first military execution in six decades:
theguardian.com
Trump approves firing-squad execution of Fort Hood shooter, Pentagon says
Nidal Hasan sentenced to death by military jury in 2013 for carrying out deadly shooting attack at army base in Texas
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
Giants fans when they check the postseason schedule:
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
“Guy who thinks George Washington was average” would be my NYT Focus Group Persona.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Is this article a bit? Because it reads like someone wrote 4,000 words on how a computer doesn’t work like a brain, then reversed it as a rhetorical stunt.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I went with the Bloomberg link because a lot of others didn’t even mention it in the hed.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
In the first millennium they’d only get heresies like this once every few decades. Now it’s almost weekly.
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Here is today's SCOTUS orders list, primarily cert denials out of the long conference: www.supremecourt.gov/orders/court...
supremecourt.gov
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Dennis Hastert is dead at 84:
bloomberg.com
Dennis Hastert, House Speaker Sullied by Abuse Case, Dies at 84
Dennis Hastert, whose rise to US House speaker in 1996 was as unexpected as the criminal conviction that sullied his reputation and sent him to prison years later, has died. He was 84.
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Doug Lindner @douglindner.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
NYT reported six months ago that SCOTUS internal deliberations on blocking Obama’s signature climate plan involved no discussion of any specific law or precedent. This morning, the MAGA-majority Supreme Court will consider blocking every climate accountability lawsuit in state courts nationwide.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
I understand why people are cynical about this stuff, but bringing these cases requires a lot of time, manpower, and money. Anti-LGBT groups and donors have no incentive to spend resources on a cause when *Alito* signals that it’s hopeless.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
It is no small thing for Alito to publicly rule out overturning Obergefell. The justices have sent other signals that they’re not interested, but this one closes the door.
cbsnews.com
The Alito Court: A rare interview with the influential Supreme Court justice
Justice Samuel Alito discussed his opinion in the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the leaked draft and its aftermath, same-sex marriage rights and why he's not retiring yet.
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
90 pitches in 3 innings with only 1 run has to be a first of some kind
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
KITTLE
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Matt Ford @mford.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Feel awful for Surtain. Such a great player.
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