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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Elie Mystal
Read between
July 2 - July 25, 2023
The right to privacy is just a substantive function of the due process clause.
None of the justices adopts my equal protection framework. Because, you know, once you start giving women equal protection of laws, the whole damn patriarchy starts to crumble.
No other operation of law forces a person to painfully change their body and reconfigure their organs because of a state interest in the results of that transformation.
Forced labor is already unconstitutional.
These hypocrites want to make rights attach at conception, but not citizenship and representation in the census.
Fetal personhood laws cannot overcome the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude, if we accept that a woman is a person who cannot be forced to labor.
Fetal personhood amendments are the state writing a check it cannot cash, then forcing women to cover the bill against their will.
The founders didn’t want poor, uneducated white men to vote, because they pretty much anticipated that poor, uneducated white men would elect a person like Donald Trump. If only they had fully empowered women and minorities, and especially minority women, to counteract their “economically aggrieved” brethren, the country they founded might be less of a mess today.
It made sense to the founders that voting rights would be left up to the states, and they saw no inherent problem with those rights being different in every state.
One way to tell the story of America is as a two-and-a-half-century, ongoing struggle to fix their error.
People have had to use persuasion to secure their rights, because they were excluded from actually participating in the votes on whether they would be allowed to vote.
Conservatives have never accepted the proposition that “everybody gets to vote now” and so they’ve turned voting rights into a game of constitutional whack-a-mole. There’s always somebody, somewhere, whose voting rights conservatives figure out how to suppress.
conservatives don’t take constitutional amendments as a denouncement of their racism; they take them as a challenge to become more creative in their bigotry.
Preclearance is dope. It’s just a fantastic way to keep states honest.
The deed was done by Chief Justice John Roberts, with a majority opinion, in Shelby County v. Holder.
Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting
His opinion purposefully opened the door to all manner of voting rights restrictions, and Republican politicians took full advantage. Voter ID laws went supernova. Polling locations in predominantly Black communities were closed. When you see lines of Black people waiting hours and hours to vote, you can largely thank John Roberts for these scenes of racism.
Most Black people still live in the states where their ancestors were enslaved.
Suppressing the vote, no matter what the Constitution says otherwise, is the prime directive for conservative jurists. It’s why they get appointed; it’s the credential that is even more important than a hostility toward abortion.
They can’t win any other way.
in 1929 the number of House members was locked at 435 people, where it still sits today.
conservative justices require their racists to self-identify as such. They require specific, “magic” words or even more explicit actions.
Hiram Revels, Blanche K. Bruce, Edward Brooke, Carol Moseley Braun, Barack Obama, Roland W. Burris, Tim Scott, William “Mo” Cowan, Cory A. Booker, Kamala D. Harris, Raphael Warnock: that is the full and complete list of African Americans to serve in the United States Senate in the history of this country. That’s eleven people.
when they uncover the Senate they’ll say, “Oh, well that was never going to work.”
there are any liberal billionaires reading: finding half a million Black people willing to take a free townhouse, and building them one in Wyoming, would be a better way to influence democracy than running a useless presidential campaign.
The Democratic candidate for president has won the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections.
As of this writing, fifteen states and DC, holding a combined 196 electoral votes, have passed the necessary legislation, so this is closer to happening than some people might think.
Republicans in California and Democrats in Texas should matter at least as much as every sentient blade of goddamn swamp grass in Florida does now.
Instead of applying individual rights as legal absolutes, we should instead seek to balance competing legitimate state interests with an eye toward justice and fairness instead of rights and prohibitions.
In most other countries, high courts resolve disputes between laws, not whether laws are valid.
Whether some people have rights or not should not depend on when the random wheel of death strikes down an octogenarian justice.
Fighting for one of nine is just a different political calculus than fighting for one of nineteen, or one of twenty-nine. That’s
an expanded Court opens the possibility for more diversity on the bench, so that the Court looks more like the country it lords over.
the quickest and easiest way to do that is simply to add more voices. Conservatives never win when everybody gets to play.
Never accept the conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Never accept the conservative limitations placed on our political, civil, and social rights.
Justice is not one constitutional option among many—it is a requirement of a free and equal society.
