Allow Me to Retort Quotes

“Minorities or women have never held a majority in either chamber of Congress, or on the Supreme Court, and there has been only one nonwhite president of the United States in American history. White people got so pissed off at that they replaced Barack Obama with a bigoted con man who questioned whether the Black president was even born in this country, and when their guy lost the next election, his people tried to start a coup.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“If the Constitution were really the triumph of reason over darkness, as it is often treated, it probably wouldn’t have failed so miserably that a devastating civil war would break out less than one hundred years later. But that happened. And if the fixes applied to the Constitution after that war ended in 1865 were so redemptive, I imagine that my mother—born in 1950 in Mississippi—would have been allowed to go inside her ostensibly “public” library while she was growing up, which of course she was not.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“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. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all. And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. 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.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Never accept the conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Never accept the conservative limitations placed on our political, civil, and social rights. They have literally always been wrong, and they are wrong now. Justice is not one constitutional option among many—it is a requirement of a free and equal society. Demand nothing less.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“The supposed rights of the unborn hold no moral suasion in a society that is willing to consign children who are born alive to poverty, malnutrition, and toxic air and water.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Please feel free to use any of my arguments against any conservatives in your life. Free of charge (well, free of additional charge). Indeed, I’ve tried to use as little legal jargon as possible to explain why conservatives are almost always entirely full of shit (full of shit being a term of art derived from the Latin: Borkium shittialis).”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“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.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Instead of going higher, instead of looking at the ideals the Reconstruction Amendments represent, originalists again try to hobble them by limiting them to what dead white people may have thought.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“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.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“At an NRA annual meeting in Cincinnati in 1977, Second Amendment “absolutists” took control of the NRA from previous leaders who thought the organization was really there to protect marksmen. Gun nuts call this event the Revolt at Cincinnati. Our modern epidemic of mass shootings can, more or less, be traced to these yahoos winning control of that organization. The ammosexuals reformed the NRA from the generally benign conglomeration of Bambi killers to the grotesque weapon of mass destruction we know it to be today. It was this new NRA that invented the radical rationalization of the Second Amendment as a right to armed self-defense. It was this new NRA that gained political supremacy in the Republican party. It was this new NRA that got Ronald Reagan, who once signed one of the most sweeping gun restrictions in the nation, to sign the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986, an act that rolled back many of the restrictions from the Gun Control Act. The NRA’s wholesale reimagining of the Second Amendment hasn’t just lured Republican politicians, it’s become part of the gospel of Republican judges. The Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, the two outside interest groups most responsible for telling Republican judges how to rule, have fully adopted an absolutist, blood-soaked interpretation of the Second Amendment. These groups of alleged “textualists” read “well regulated militia” clear out of the text of the Amendment. Instead, they substitute self-defense as the “original purpose” of the language. There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Constitutional protections of speech are mainly concerned with the government’s attempts to silence or punish views the ruling party doesn’t like. The Constitution cares about people limiting the inquiry of a free press through lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits. It cares about armed agents of the state threatening or jailing citizens who dare to protest the actions of that state. In short, the First Amendment cares about the things Republicans do when they control the government.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“But I bring up my background in the law because hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book. Not the healthiest emotion, I know, but for me it’s clarifying. 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.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Tying representation to the land as opposed to the people living on it is, among other things, fucking stupid.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Refusing to do your job because the person paying you to do it has different beliefs than you is not a religious objection, it’s plain and simple bigotry.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“In a direct response to African Americans patrolling Oakland, California, and “copwatching,” Republicans in California passed the Mulford Act, which banned open carry of loaded firearms in California. Who signed that law? Republican patron saint and then governor of California Ronald Reagan. The absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is new, but using gun rights or gun control, as necessary, to maintain racial dominance is old.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“In case you haven’t already guessed, I reject that form of legal analysis. A 5–4 ruling on the Supreme Court directly affects the likelihood of me getting shot to death by the police while driving to the store. It directly affects whether my kids can walk to the bus stop unmolested and unafraid of the cops driving by. I refuse to pretend to be intellectually dispassionate about such things. I refuse to act as if second-class status within my own country is one option among many. My “emotion chip” is fully operational.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“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. The Constitution is an imperfect work that urgently and consistently needs to be modified and reimagined to make good on its unrealized promises of justice and equality for all. And yet you rarely see liberals make the point that the Constitution is actually trash. 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. Why would I give a fuck about the original public meaning of the words written by these men? Conservatives will tell you that the text of laws explicitly passed in response to growing political, social, or economic power of nonwhite minorities should be followed to their highest grammatical accuracy, and I’m supposed to agree the text of this bullshit is the valid starting point of the debate? Nah. As Rory Breaker says in the movie Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: “If the milk turns out to be sour, I ain’t the kind of pussy to drink it.” The Constitution was so flawed upon its release in 1787 that it came with immediate updates. The first ten amendments, the “Bill of Rights,” were demanded by some to ensure ratification of the rest of the document. All of them were written by James Madison, who didn’t think they were actually necessary but did it to placate political interests.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Conservatives never win when everybody gets to play.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Republicans are right to go to the mattresses every time one of these openings come up, and Democrats have been fools not to adopt the same tactics.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Without commanding a single troop or passing a single bill, a conservative Supreme Court is not a check on the other branches of government, but a check on progress itself. We can move only as far and as fast as the nine unelected and unaccountable justices on the Court allow us to.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Ain’t that something? To amend the structure of the Senate the people who most benefit from its bigotry have to first agree to give up their advantage. Tell me this document wasn’t written by slavers and colonists who knew exactly the kind of white supremacist society they were trying to write into existence.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Only six Black people in American history just went out and won a U.S. Senate seat via popular vote (though Scott eventually won a reelection campaign). Black people have had more prophets than goddamn senators.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“As long as white people make up a plurality of voters in a state, and as long as white people stick together in that state, white people get to control both of the state’s allotted senators.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Left unchecked, Republican state legislatures will use that power to disenfranchise racial minorities. That’s not a guess; it’s just literally what Republicans already always do whenever given the slightest opportunity. Thanks to John Roberts, they’ll say their maps are “political” gerrymanders: it’s just a coincidence that Black people happen to overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, because Democrats seem to be the only party that can go four years at a stretch without giving aid and comfort to Klansmen.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“It was repealed by voter referendum, and 40 percent of the people voted to keep the law banning interracial marriages”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“But I bring up my background in the law because hatred is a pretty big reason I’ve written this book. Not the healthiest emotion, I know, but for me it’s clarifying. 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. Most legal stories”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“A world where the federal government couldn’t restrict the freedom of the press, but Georgia could, was something that people actually believed for a long time, and is a world that still exists on the margins today.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“the structure of the Senate is the result of the “Great Compromise” or “Connecticut Compromise” at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Smaller states were worried about being controlled by larger, more populous states. The South in particular was worried about losing the privilege to work and rape Black people to death. The compromise provided that one chamber of the legislature, the House of Representatives, would be apportioned based on population, while the other, the Senate, would give equal representation to each state. To put it another way: white slavers feared “democracy” so much that they wrote it out of the Constitution.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“the United States Senate is not an exercise in republican government; it’s a prophylactic to prevent republican self-government.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution

“Looking to Jim Crow–era white society for guidance on how to bring about racial equality, of all things, is insane.”
― Elie Mystal, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution