Ah yes, Elie Mystal—the legal mind who never met a Constitution he couldn’t rewrite with a Sharpie and a race-baiting punchline.
The regular MSNBC talking head and justice correspondent for The Nation is back at it again, this time gracing The View with his hot take that—wait for it—every law passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act should be considered “presumptively unconstitutional.” Yes, you read that right. According to Mystal, a Harvard-educated lawyer who somehow still manages to sound like a Twitter activist with a law degree from Tumblr, we should treat any law made prior to 1965 as illegitimate simply because, in his words, “we were an apartheid country.”
He actually said that. On national television. With a straight face.
This is the same guy who, just days earlier, was lamenting that the Trump administration’s efforts to deport gang members and illegal immigrants who pose threats to public safety amount to “fascism.” Because, naturally, enforcing the law is tyranny in Mystal’s world—but erasing a century and a half of American legal history? That’s just good progress.
Let’s take a moment here. The 1965 Voting Rights Act is absolutely a landmark piece of legislation. But the idea that the thousands of laws passed before that date—laws that include everything from criminal codes to tax statutes to basic governance frameworks—are “presumptively unconstitutional” is not just intellectually lazy. It’s dangerous. This isn’t legal scholarship; it’s race-based nihilism dressed up as activism. According to Mystal, it doesn’t matter whether a law has nothing to do with race, voting, or civil rights. If it was passed before 1965, some “old white man” signed it, so chuck it in the trash. That’s the argument.
We’re supposed to take this seriously?
Mystal’s comments are less about the law and more about his obsession with grievance as a political currency. His latest book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, appears to be just a collection of anti-American, anti-Constitution screeds where the common denominator is less about the law itself and more about who wrote it and what they looked like.
And of course, he followed up his View appearance with a classic X (formerly Twitter) post gloating that he’d “pissed off the white wing.” Because what better way to sell books than to inflame racial division and pretend that righteous indignation equals legal insight?
And let’s not forget, this man is a regular on MSNBC, where he’s trotted out as some kind of legal sage—usually sandwiched between Rachel Maddow monologues and Joy Reid’s nightly meltdown over democracy “dying in darkness.” He even teamed up recently with Michael Steele, the former RNC chair who now serves as MSNBC’s favorite Republican-turned-performer. Together, they painted Trump’s immigration enforcement as fascism—because apparently deporting MS-13 members and visa overstayers is now morally equivalent to authoritarian rule.
Here’s the reality: Mystal is not trying to improve the law—he’s trying to dismantle it. His brand of performative outrage isn’t about civil rights or justice. It’s about delegitimizing the foundations of a country that doesn’t fit his ideological mold. If you think we should review or repeal specific laws because they’re outdated or harmful, fine—let’s debate them. But dismissing everything written before 1965 with a blanket claim of racial apartheid? That’s not constitutional critique, it’s childish radicalism.
Guest on “The View” says all laws before 1965 should be ruled null and void: “Why should I give a f*** about some law that some old White man passed in the 1920s?” pic.twitter.com/x4Y6veWgFg
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) April 1, 2025
And make no mistake—this isn’t just a fringe opinion anymore. Mystal represents a growing wing of the progressive movement that thinks America didn’t begin in 1776, but in 1619, and that the solution to every modern problem is to burn the past down to the studs and rebuild it based on identity politics and selective outrage.
Deranged leftist Elie Mystal wants Democrats back in charge so they can “eliminate all voter registration laws.”
Who’s a threat to democracy now?pic.twitter.com/JgZuXWfPDy
— Media Research Center (@theMRC) March 24, 2025
But here’s the good news: the American people aren’t buying it. Most voters can smell this nonsense from a mile away. They know the difference between thoughtful reform and ideological demolition. Mystal can keep screaming into the MSNBC echo chamber all he wants—out here in the real world, law and order still matter. History still matters. And no, Elie, the Constitution isn’t unconstitutional just because it predates your personal enlightenment.
But hey, thanks for the book promo. The rest of us will keep enforcing the law while you keep rewriting it in crayon.
