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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Elie Mystal
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July 31 - August 12, 2022
Our Constitution is not good. It is a document designed to create a society of enduring white male dominance, hastily edited in the margins to allow for what basic political rights white men could be convinced to share.
Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters who were trying to protect their rights to rape the humans they held in bondage.
The Constitution is not gospel, it’s not magic, and it’s not even particularly successful if you count one civil war, one massive minority uprising for justice that kind of worked against tons that have been largely rebuffed, and one failed coup led by the actual president, as “demerits.”
What conservatives do and try to do through the Constitution and the law is disgusting. They use the law to humiliate people, to torture people, and to murder people, and tell you they’re just “following orders” from the Constitution. They frustrate legislation meant to help people, free people, or cure people, and they tell you it’s because of “doctrinal interpretative framework.” They use the very same legal arguments that have been used to justify slavery, segregation, and oppression for four hundred years on this continent and tell you it’s the only “objective” way of interpreting the law.
People are told that the law is an “objective” thing, almost like it’s a form of physics. But it’s not: the law is a collection of subjective decisions we—well, white people—have made over the years to protect people and activities they like, and to punish people and activities they don’t like. The law can be applied objectively, though it isn’t most of the time. But the notion that the law is a mathematical equation that can be fed into a supercomputer to produce “justice” is a total fallacy.
Free speech protects people with theocratic views, but it doesn’t give them the right to impose those views on things like the market economy and the health care system.
Gun rights are not about self-defense. They literally never have been. Gun rights are about menacing, intimidating, and killing racial minorities, if necessary. That’s why Reagan and company had no problem restricting gun rights when the Black Panthers started to use them; that’s why the NRA never speaks up when a “law-abiding gun owner” who happens to be Black is executed in the streets by a cop.
The Fifth Amendment is a litmus test of whether you have enough education (from the books or from the streets) to know it exists. And that’s not how it’s supposed to be. Your constitutional rights aren’t supposed to change depending on whether you know they exist.
Nothing decent can overcome a conservative court. That’s something that modern liberals and progressives should always remember.
The current Supreme Court has more in common with the court in Plessy than the court in Loving. The only real difference between conservatives in 1896 and the ones we have today is that the Federalist Society teaches them how to edit out their bigoted slurs.
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. You’ll note that Griswold applied to married women; it took a while for the court to extend its logic to unmarried women, but that extension would have happened immediately under an equal protection framework. God forbid they gave women suspect class status, triggering strict scrutiny of discriminatory laws and practices. Then they might even have to start paying women equally.
It’s barbaric to force a woman who had consensual sex to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, even if she can carry that fetus to term safely. I don’t even have a word for what it is to force a rape victim to carry her assailant’s baby to term at the risk of her own life. I don’t think there is a word for that.
Their legal arguments are no better than their moral ones. Because fetal personhood amendments aren’t really about some kind of theoretical right “to become life.” If they were, activists would be busy trying to bring the hundreds of thousands of embryos lying abandoned in frozen stasis at our nation’s fertility clinics to life, which they’re not. No, what the conservatives want is forced incubation of fetuses by women who are unwilling to perform the work.
the legal argument that a fetus has a legal status on par with the woman to whom it is literally attached is illogical trash sprinkled with bad faith and misogyny.
From a certain point of view, rich people never have a problem with monarchy; they have a problem with hereditary monarchy. Throughout history, regicidal motherfuckers tend to show up when rich people can’t buy their way into more power than they were born into. It’s all really a game of thrones, if you will. And our founders were more Lannister than Stark: just a bunch of rich people rebelling against a “mad king,” who weren’t really interested in freeing anybody but themselves.
Justice is not one constitutional option among many—it is a requirement of a free and equal society. Demand nothing less.
