The Nation justice correspondent, frequent MSNBC guest, and all around crazy person Elie Mystal took his book tour to The Breakfast Club podcast on Thursday. The premise for Mystal’s book is the laughable premise that every law passed prior to 1965 is unconstitutional, but also that the constitution is “a piece of crap.”
Mystal began with a terrible analogy, “When South Africa got over apartheid, did they just go back to their Afrikaner racist constitution and be like, ‘Oh, we just need a couple amendments, we just need a couple of changes here to make way.’”
Answering his own question, Mystal continued, “No! They threw the whole thing out and started again, this time asking everybody, this time having a completely new delegation of all the people of South Africa, not just the white folks, but not no white folks, and they came up with a new constitution. It’s one of the reasons why the South African constitution is generally thought of as one of the best constitutions in the world and ours continues to be a piece of crap.”
Mystal didn’t make the usual argument that the three-fifths compromise was wrong or anything like that; he said it “continues” to be bad, so what about our constitution makes it a “piece of crap”? Is it the separation of powers? Federalism? The Bill of Rights? Limited government power? Those would be weird things for a progressive to complain about in the age of Donald Trump.
Ultimately, it appears Mystal just wants his policy preferences enshrined as constitutional mandates. DJ Envy asked him, “So what laws would you kick out immediately? What laws are you seeing that needs to get the fuck out of here?”
Echoing a point he made on The View, Mystal’s first instinct was to go for voter registration laws, “Yeah, so the first one I have in my book is that I want to eliminate every single voter registration law, all of them. All of them in every state are bad. That’s different than voter eligibility, right?”
Mystal further compared voter registration laws to a scenario where, “the government says ‘No, you can’t fish there,’ and I say, ‘Why?’ They say, ‘Because the Loch Ness Monster might get ya.’ Get out of my face with that. Shut up, that’s stupid.
If one assumes, for the sake of discussion, that he gets his way and automatic registration for everyone who is eligible becomes the law, how do election authorities verify people are eligible? Finally, the Loch Ness Monster doesn’t exist, but Mystal’s instance that voter fraud is basically nonexistent is because there are laws against it, not because it is a mythical being.
Here is a transcript for the April 3 show:
The Breakfast Club
4/3/2025
ELIE MYSTAL: When South Africa got over apartheid, did they just go back to their Afrikaner racist constitution and be like, ‘Oh, we just need a couple amendments, we just need a couple of changes here to make way.’
No! They threw the whole thing out and started again, this time asking everybody, this time having a completely new delegation of all the people of South Africa, not just the white folks, but not no white folks, and they came up with a new constitution. It’s one of the reasons why the South African constitution is generally thought of as one of the best constitutions in the world and ours continues to be a piece of crap.
DJ ENVY: So what laws would you kick out immediately? What laws are you seeing that needs to get the fuck out of here?”
MYSTAL: Yeah, so the first one I have in my book is that I want to eliminate every single voter registration law, all of them. All of them in every state are bad. That’s different than voter eligibility, right?
I think we can all agree that there should be eligibility requirements like an age requirement, right? You have to be 18 to vote. I might say 16, but I’m not going to say 8, right? I got an 8-year old—we don’t want—no. They’re not ready for that, right?
That’s a voter eligibility requirement, but once we—once your eligible, there’s no reason for you to have to pre-register in order to execute your franchise. You’re eligible to vote, you should be to just rock to up to the polls and vote. Again, I didn’t make that up. That’s what they do in nearly every other democracy. Nearly, every other democracy either has mandatory registration, automatic registration, or same day registration.
What we do with this bullcrap of, like, having to show up 10 days before, a month before in some places in order to pre-register before you’re—we’re alone basically in the modern world in terms of people who do that. So, we can just get rid of all of them. We can just get rid of all of them.
And people will say, like, “Oh, well, we can’t do that because of voter fraud.” Right? Well, first of all, and I know this is going to be hard for some listeners who spend a lot of time listening to Republican lies, but voter fraud does not exist.
CHARLAMAGNE THA GOD: I loved how you broke that down in your book. It’s loud and clear.
MYSTAL: Voter fraud just doesn’t exist. It’s not a real thing. We shouldn’t make laws based on protecting us from things that don’t exist, right? An analogy I’ve made is like if let’s say I wanted to go fishing and I want to fishing in that lake, the government says “No, you can’t fish there,” and I say “Why?” they say, “Because the Loch Ness Monster might get ya.” Get out of my face with that. Shut up, that’s stupid.
