On a recent episode of The View, legal firebrand and bestselling author Elie Mystal didn’t hold back. Promoting his new book Bad Law: 10 Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, Mystal shared one of his most provocative takes yet: every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, he argued, should be presumed unconstitutional.
“Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we were functionally an apartheid country,” Mystal told the hosts. “Not everybody who lived here could vote here. So why should I care about some law that some old white man passed in the 1920s?”
The statement, bold and unapologetic, came during a conversation about the Immigration and Nationality Act — a law currently being used by the Trump administration to justify detentions and deportations of visa and green card holders. Mystal made it clear: “That is the authority that Trump is using to criminalize people and to pull people’s visa cards.”
He contextualized the origin of the Immigration and Nationality Act, originally passed in 1921 and updated in 1956. “When they passed our fundamental immigration law, Congress said, in real time, that they needed the law to prevent the, quote, ‘mongrelization of the white race by the inferior races,’” Mystal stated. “I look at that law and I say, I don’t think that’s so good. I don’t think we should still be using it.”
Mystal explained that he wrote Bad Law not to reform, not to modernize, but to smash what he views as fundamentally broken and racist frameworks. “When Republicans come into office, they come in with a sledgehammer. They come in smashing things that I hold dear. When Democrats come into office, they come in with, like, superglue and tape. And they try to put things back together,” he said. “We need to smash the things that they like. We need to smash the things that are holding this country back.”
That destruction, in Mystal’s view, begins with dismantling the legal infrastructure built before civil rights were fully recognized in America.
“Immigration status offenses should not be criminal offenses. They should be civil offenses,” he said. “We shouldn’t be ripping people away from their families because they didn’t fill out the paperwork right.”
Check out the full conversation.
Photo Credit: ABC
