By Elie Mystal

Elie Mystal remains so funny and smart on the slowly dying Twitter platform, and his book is funny and smart, of course, too, but also infuriating. He uses his very comprehensive knowledge of law to walk the reader through how the constitution has been twisted to protect only some citizens while continually persecuting others.

After giving a fair amount of background in a much needed (for me) setting of the legal stage, Mystal gets down to his two central theses: 1) that originalists (like our current sitting conservative judges) are simply wrong for trying to solely recreate the intention of rich white slave-holding men who did not accept women or any nonwhite people as equals; and 2) all or at least most of our current constitutional crises could be fixed if everyone followed just the 1^st and 14^th amendment to the fullest extent (that all the other amendments are just closing loopholes that conservatives should never have been allowed to make in the first place).

Every point is bristling with examples from real life cases, which was both immensely helpful to put in context and a struggle, either intellectually because of the legalese or emotionally because of the hypocrisy of the judgments. I truly think Mystal does a masterful job of simplifying each case down to its basics, but I still had to take a deep break and brace myself before each v.

Mystal divides the book into short chapters addressing discrete arguments and provides not only legal, but also philosophical, and anecdotal examples. This makes the book much more readable than it otherwise could have been, but it still hovered around the top edge of my understanding. Which isn’t a bad thing at all! It’s good to stretch with books that are a little advanced, but I definitely had to take my time. (Bless him, though, for mixing in Star Wars and Marvel movie metaphors with Socratic and Hobbesian arguments.)

He closes the book with some quite straight-forward suggestions for fixing our current predicament, mainly eliminating the electoral college and expanding the supreme court, and makes solid arguments for the logic and legality of both. It left me with a lot to think about, and a mixture of hope and pessimism about our government and society as a whole.