Title: Elie Mystal's List of Laws that Need to Go

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Have you ever heard about a law and thought, "Geez, that's really dumb. This country's full of odd and silly laws." Here's some I read on a Fox News listicle from early last year. In Arkansas, no person shall sound the horn on a vehicle at any place where cold drinks or sandwiches are served after 9:00 PM, according to Little Rock's Code of Ordinances, Chapter 18, Section 1854. Section 8-1 of a Georgia law prohibits chickens from crossing the road. We could ask why they did it, but we can't because they can't do it.

Title 97, Chapter 29 of a Mississippi law prohibits profanity. You can be fined $100 if you get caught cursing or cussing, as they sometimes call it there. While a lot of bad laws are relatively harmless, many have caused major harm. That's at least the premise of where Elie Mystal comes in. You know him as justice correspondent and columnist for The Nation magazine and host of the podcast Contempt of Court with Elie Mystal. He's got a new book out called Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. He joins us now to talk about it, as well as some current events. Elie, welcome back to WNYC. Always good to have you.

Elie Mystal: Hi, Brian. How are you? In New Jersey, you can't flip off a police officer, which I think is a terrible law, but did not make my book.

Brian: You start the book with a pretty novel blanket statement. Just to set this up, you automatically deem any law before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as fundamentally unconstitutional.

What?

Elie: Presumptively unconstitutional. Look, before 1965, this country was functionally an apartheid state. Not everybody who lived here was allowed to vote here and participate in the government here. That is not okay. Before the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave at least the paper legal authority for everybody to vote, this country was suspect. I say any law passed before everybody could have a say in which laws were passed is fundamentally constitutionally suspect. I'm not saying that all those laws are bad. I'm not saying that everything that passed exclusively by and for white men were terrible ideas.

I personally like the Sherman Antitrust Act. I think that was pretty smart. I like the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was passed before the 1965 Voting Rights Act. My premise is that if we like some of these old laws, we could surely pass them again. We could surely pass them again, this time asking everybody if they agree, not just rich white folks. That would immediately lead to a better country if we reviewed the laws that were passed when not everybody could vote and not everybody could participate and see if we still agree.

Brian: In your introduction, you acknowledge some of your biases, if I can use that word. We were just talking about biases in the last segment. They're in the eye of the beholder often. Before listeners call or text to point out that you work for the nation, you're sharing only one point of view, do you want to explain how you characterize your own biases and why you don't shy away from that label?

Elie: Yes. Brian, look, I'm not trying to gaslight anybody. I'm not trying to pretend that I consider both sides equally. I don't. I am objective from my perspective. My perspective is desperately lodged in the idea that this should be a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, democratic self-government based on the principles of fairness and equality. If you don't agree with me, I don't got a lot of time for you.

I'm not trying to persuade people who don't agree that racial justice should be a thing, who don't agree that women should be given every single right that a man has, who don't agree that LGBTQ people are also people and are deserving of civil rights and legal protections. If you don't agree with that, you've got an entire movement to go drool over and do your thing. God did not put me on this earth to persuade bigots to chew with their mouths closed.

The point of my book and the point of my career is to get people who already agree with me, to get people who are already trying to pull the rope in the same direction that I'm trying to pull it, towards a more fair, more equal, and more just society, to get us all to pull the rope maybe a little bit more efficiently, maybe a little bit smarter, maybe a little bit harder. That's why I'm here. There are plenty of people who disagree with me, and God bless them, but those people are not my concern.

Brian: All right. We're going to go down your list. You have 10 actual bad laws, bad according to you. Part of your premise, I guess we should say, is these are not things in the Constitution that it would be almost impossible to change. These are just laws that have been passed in various places, so they can be repealed. Is that important as a premise before we go?

Elie: Absolutely. Look, my first book, Allow Me to Retort, that was really about how the Constitution has been generally misinterpreted by conservatives. This book, Bad Law, this is about laws that are functioning as intended. These laws were passed, and Brian, an important part of my book, I put in the title, it's 10 popular laws. These laws, when they were passed, enjoyed broad bipartisan support. These are things that people, at least at the time that they were passed, thought were good ideas, but their ideas and what those laws are doing are terrible, according to me, and do great harm, according to me.

The scoping mechanism, the reason why the frowning of the cop in New Jersey isn't on my list, or that you can't chain your alligator to a fire hydrant in Alabama, the reason why that's not in the book, is because the scoping mechanism for the book was laws that we could just repeal, not reform, not update for the modern age, laws that we could just get rid of by statute today, and have our society and our country be better tomorrow.

Brian: Your bad law number one, which is really a bunch of laws, you believe we should repeal all voter registration laws. Why should we do that?

Elie: Every single one. Look, voter eligibility requirements are necessary. We might disagree about what those eligibility requirements should be, but imagine an age requirement. I might say 16 should be old enough to vote. You might say 18, but neither of us are going to say 8. Neither of us are going to say 4. That's a voter eligibility requirement, and we should have some of them. Once you meet the eligibility requirements, there is no intellectual reason for you to have to pre-register. That is not just me saying that. That is the rest of the democratic world saying that.

No other country has the kind of pre-registration that we have. In most other countries, in most other democracies, registration is either automatic, mandatory, or you can register on the exact same day that you vote, so there is no second hurdle, there is no friction between registering and voting. Our system of requiring people to pre-register days or weeks or sometimes months in advance before they are allowed to vote in an election that they are already eligible to vote in is stupid and done specifically to suppress the votes of new immigrants and Black people.

The voter registration laws were not endemic to the founding of this country. We didn't have them in 1787. We didn't really have them in the 1800s until after the Civil War. The first voter registration laws, Brian, the first big popular ones, were in New York City, in our very own New York City. As I explain in the book, Brian, it's interesting, the first voter registration laws that applied to New York City to try to stop Italians and Irish and freed Blacks from voting in New York City didn't apply to the whole state. Look at that.

You had to pre-register to vote in New York City for a New York State election or a federal election, but you didn't have to pre-register if you lived in Rochester or Syracuse or Albany. What's up with that? That shows the bigoted intent of our first voter registration laws in the state.

Brian: A lot of people ask, "How do you prevent voter fraud?"

Elie: Brian, I got two answers to that. First of all, voter fraud isn't a thing. I know that the Republican, "Oh, it's the boogeyman." It's not actually a thing. I don't think that we should make laws based on boogeyman stories. You don't say, "Oh, you can't fish there. I'm going to take away your right to fish." Why? "Because the Loch Ness monster might get you." That doesn't make any sense. Loch Ness monster doesn't exist. Fish all you want. Similarly, voter fraud doesn't exist in any real actionable way. Making laws to prevent the thing that doesn't exist is stupid. That's number one.

Number two, it is, again, just as easy to fake a voter registration as it is voter eligibility. Indeed, it might be easier to fake a voter registration because most of our voter registration happens entirely throughout the mail. If the government can establish that you were eligible to vote, that is the bar on fraud, not this additional second hurdle of registration. My final point is that, Brian, we live in the future. Amazon knows if I need new underwear before I do.

In that world, the premise of the chapter is that elections should be inexpensive, frictionless, and easy for the voters. Expensive and difficult to administer and time-consuming for the government. The burden should be on the government to make sure that I'm eligible to vote, not on me to prove that I have a right to vote in this alleged democracy.

Brian: All right. Your bad law number two, according to the list in your book, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1921, which criminalizes illegal reentry into the United States. Again, a lot of people may say, "What? We may want pretty broad legal immigration in this country, but if you're here illegally, and you get kicked out, and you illegally re-enter the country again, why shouldn't that be criminalized?"

Elie: Because immigration offenses shouldn't be crimes. They should be civil offenses. That's what the first entry is. It's a civil offense. Deportation is a civil offense. Criminalization of being out of status is what puts people in jail, is what separates people from their families, is what induces unnecessary cruelty into the system of criminalizing immigration offenses. You brought up what Republicans say is the classic example. A person comes, they're kicked out, they come again, and again, and again. At some point, we need to criminalize them and put them in jail.

First of all, our just experience on the ground tells us that putting people in jail don't stop them from coming. It just hasn't worked to criminalize offenses if what you're trying to do is reduce illegal reentry, number one. Number two, the idea that we should be, that the person is coming again and again, and that's the real criminal, that's not actually the classic illegal reentry case. The classic illegal reentry case is a person who has overstayed their visa, because if you overstay your visa, according to this law, this 1921 law, you have been found in the United States illegally again. You can be criminalized if you overstay your visa.

People who are seasonal workers, so they cross the border season after season after season, often for the harvest in the Southwest. You come every year, one year you're out of status. You didn't know you were out of status because while you're chilling in Mexico, you're not exactly following the latest immigration laws passed by Congress in Washington, DC. You think you're in status, so you come, but because you have applied for status and been denied, that becomes your illegal reentry. The first entry was the application coming after you were denied, is now criminalized. It's dumb.

The other thing that I point out in the book is that that 1921 law that was based mainly on the testimony and the science of a man named Dr. Howard Laughlin, who was a eugenicist. Such a good eugenicist that the Nazis invited him over to Germany and used his science for their eugenics plans. Congress repeatedly referred to this Nazi eugenicist as they were writing the law. One of the things I do, Brian, in the book, as much as I can, is to, again, not ask people to take my word for these things.

I go back, and I look at what the people who passed the law actually said they were trying to do when they passed it. Here, with the Immigration and Nationality Act, they literally say that they're passing this law to prevent the mongrelization of the white race by the inferior races. I think we could be rid of this law now.

Brian: By the way, listener writes-- Oh, you're getting a lot of texts. We'll read a few of these. Just going back to the beginning when you said presumptively no law before the Voting Rights Act should be considered constitutional. Somebody did write in, "What about before women got the vote?"

Elie: The Voting Rights Act in 1965 happened after the passage of the 19th Amendment in-- I want to say 1921. I'm forgetting the date on that. Sure, I also think laws passed before women got the constitutional right to vote should be viewed as suspect. Specifically with the 1965 Voting Rights Act, that's the first thing that made the 19th Amendment real for Black women as well.

Even after white women got the vote after the passage of the 19th Amendment, for the most part, Black women didn't until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I think saying that we got rid of apartheid in 1965 is a very generous way of putting that. I could just as easily say 1984. I could just as easily say we still haven't gotten rid of it. In terms of a legal ability to participate in the government, I start the clock in 1965.

Brian: All right. People are calling in. People are texting in. I want to make sure everybody has the phone number 212-433-WNYC for Elie Mystal, justice correspondent of The Nation, whose new book is Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. 212-433-9692. We're going to keep going down this list, and then we're going to do a part two toward the end where I'm going to ask you, Elie, to talk about just how much of a season we're about to see at the Supreme Court, because Trump, who is being stopped from aspects of his agenda basically only by the courts at this point, is starting to appeal thing after the thing to the Supreme Court, which, of course, he has reason to think may be relatively inclined to support him.

We'll see what you think about some of the particular really consequential cases that are headed there. Listeners, what I'm going to do now is just read the list of these ten popular laws that Elie says are ruining America, just so you have the list, and then we'll continue to discuss some of them in some more detail. Number one, Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which is immunity for gun manufacturers. Number two, the Armed Career Criminal Act, excessive criminal sentencing. Three, felony murder. Four, stand-your-ground. Five, Airline Deregulation Act.

Six, voter registration laws, all of them, we've been talking about those. Seven, the Hyde Amendment, which restricts federal funding for abortion. Eight, Don't Say Gay "censorship." Nine, religious freedom, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which you say is discriminatory. Number 10, illegal reentry, we've been talking about that as well. One of the interesting ones to some people, and they may think, "Oh, that's a funny one to be on this particular list," considering everything else, is number five, the Airline Deregulation Act, which you cite as the birthdate of neoliberalism, October 24th, 1978. Why that?

Elie: Brian, when I'm researching this book, as my normal process is, I see something terrible in the country, I see something bad happening, and I say, "Bring me the Republicans. Show me the mustache-twirling Republicans behind this terrible idea." There always are. There's always a mustache-twirling Republican behind the curtain. In my research for this book, again and again and again, I kept seeing Democrats. I kept seeing Democrats co-sponsoring these bills. I kept seeing Democrats spearhead these bills.

I kept seeing Democrats give them the critical votes to get the bill over the line in the House or the Senate. The Airline Deregulation Act became really a focal point for me as I was doing my research, as like-- Republicans obviously wanted it, deregulation was a Republican idea, but this is something that was co-opted by the Democratic Party. Some of our best Democratic senators, Ted Kennedy, was the real spearhead of this massive corporate giveaway.

I wrote about how, if you understand how the Democrats passed the Airline Deregulation Act, you can understand every mistake the Democratic Party has made for 50 years. What the Airline Deregulation Act did is not only give a massive public welfare to rich airline executives, it also gutted labor in the airline industries, gutted consumer protections over our friendly skies, made them a whole lot less friendly and a whole lot more cramped and a whole lot more nickled and dimed.

Then that method, that deregulatory method, was then copy and pasted to industry after industry, the telecommunications industry, the banking industry. Now we're seeing it happen in the private prisons industry. While right now everybody's like, "I don't know, maybe privatization is a bad thing," it all can be traced back to how Democrats sold this particular Republican idea to other Democrats. That's why it's on the list.

Brian: Interesting. How about the Religious Freedom Restoration Act? What religious freedom did it restore and when?

Elie: The whole point of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, according to the Democrats that supported it, was to protect minority religions from over-encroachment by the majority religion, which is Christianity in this country. The way the Republicans sold the bill was to protect Christianity. One of the real questions that I ask in that chapter is, what happens when the persecutors get in charge of the bill that's supposed to protect the persecuted?

What happens is the last 30 years of Christian theocracy that we've seen rampaging through our government, what happens directly are things like the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the Hobby Lobby case, which prevents women from getting contraception, depending on whether or not their private employers think that birth control pills offend Jesus. It is one of the worst religious freedom laws we have because it promotes people trying to do their religious theocracy in place of secular government.

Brian: Number three on your list is felony murder. People say, "Wait, felony murder is a bad law. Shouldn't be illegal?"

Elie: Felony murder is such a bad law that it has been declared unconstitutional by every other commonwealth country that is commonwealth country, countries that get their laws basically from ye olde England. You can trace your legal code back to the Magna Carta, your commonwealth country. Every commonwealth country has gotten rid of or ruled felony murder unconstitutional except us. England, Ireland, Canada, you name it. They're all like, "This is terrible." Us, we're like, "No, let's keep doing it, bro. What's the problem?"

Just really quickly, felony murder is the idea that if you are part of a felony operation, you commit some kind of serious crime and somebody dies in the commission of your crime, you can be charged with murder and sent away to jail for the rest of your life. There is some question in certain states like Florida, you can maybe even be put to death for it, but you didn't actually kill anybody. One of your accomplices killed somebody. We might think, " Certainly, we want to charge people who aid and abet in crimes with murder." I agree.

That's not what felony murder does, though. It doesn't charge people who aid and abet in murder. We have different laws that charge people who aid and abet in murder. Felony murder is for the specific situation where a murder happened, and you had nothing to do with it. What happens in the classic felony murder case is the cops actually come in and do the murder, do the killing. Then you, the surviving member of the criminal enterprise, are the person who gets charged with murder.

One of the examples that I point out in my book, if the cops come into my house to serve a warrant without a no-knock warrant, and I try to run, I try to get away from the cops, I try to escape out of the back door, and the cops just shoot up my whole house and kill my family, when they catch me, I'm the one who gets charged with the murder of my own family that the cops shot because I was committing the felony of trying to get away. That is unjust. That is unjust in a moral way beyond just the legal way. Again, other countries have already figured that out and already gotten rid of this terrible rule.

Brian: You group felony murder in the book with two others, the stand-your-ground law, which people will remember from the Trayvon Martin killing in Florida over a decade ago now, and the Armed Career Criminal Act. That sounds like a bad thing to be an armed career criminal. Give us the big picture there.

Elie: On the ACCA, the Armed Career Criminal Act, the real problem there is the introduction of, for the first time, mandatory minimums. Brian, if you gave me a choice, we can either have mandatory minimums or trial by combat, I would choose trial by combat as the more just option than mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums impose mandatory 15-year sentences on people who have committed their third violent offense. We count things like drug possession as a violent offense that counts towards your "three strikes" towards this over-incarcerated 15-year mandatory minimum sentence.

The ACCA is the bill passed by Ronald Reagan, but with the help of Democrats, that started the mass incarceration system that we now live with today. Everybody wants to talk about the 1994 Crime Bill. The 1994 Crime Bill passed by Bill Clinton, written by Joe Biden, is terrible, make no mistake. That bill comes on the backs of the Armed Career Criminal Act. That 1994 Crime Bill is an update to the Armed Career Criminals Act. The Armed Career Criminals Act is the rot, and everything else are just the tendrils.

Brian: I want you to know what's breaking out on our text thread. This has happened before when you've been on. I just want to know, is this what you get all the time when you do media appearances? One person, representing a certain group, wrote, "Elie Mysta is a great guest. Thanks for having him on the show, and please have him come on the air more often." Another person writes, reflecting a different group, "This bloated, word I can't say on the radio, is one of the reasons I can't wait to see all your funding canceled." [laughs] Do you find reaction to you in those camps a lot?

Elie: I bring it out of them, don't I? Obviously, yes, it happens to me all the time. Nobody's actually ever asked me about it, I don't think. My off-the-cuff answer is that, good, I'm glad the people who disagree with me are pissed at me. Good. Enjoy your hate and anger. This, to me, is what liberals are supposed to sound like. This, to me, is how liberals are supposed to think and fight and argue for a better world. I am so sick of being in a defensive, fetal position in front of these mouth-breathers. No.

It's beyond the fact that I disagree with their policies, and I want to protect the institutions that I care about. I don't. I want to smash their policies. I've been saying, Brian, that part of the reason why I wrote this book is that this is my best attempt to start Project 2029, because when Republicans get in charge, the first thing they do is smash everything I care about. They take from me the things that I value most dearly.

When Democrats get in power, all we do is fetal, is turtle up. All we do is like, "Oh, well, don't hurt us anymore. We're going to restore the institutions. It's going to be okay, guys." No. I want to smash what they care about. This book talks about certain things that they have put into our system with the help of Democrats that we can just smash and have a better world tomorrow. I'm glad they're angry at me at some level. I hope they don't hurt me. That's the other problem here.

Brian: Here's another pair. One just writes, "Elie Mystal rocks." Then another one on the other side of this writes, "Regarding the discussion about laws to eliminate, I am a liberal progressive, and I need to turn this segment off. I find the simplicity of the racial generalizations harmful, antithetical to the issue of injustice, and counterproductive to coming to terms with the past or bridging gaps that still exist. In my opinion, this approach is in part why we are now in the mess we are in all the way around." I'm curious what you'd say to that listener who describes themselves as a liberal progressive but thinks you're generalizing, especially racially, too much, too simply.

Elie: First of all, did I even talk about race a lot in this segment? I talk about usually race much often, more often when I'm on with you, we're talking about real racial issues. I think the only time that I brought up race is the inherent bigotry in our immigration system and our voting system. If your listener doesn't understand the inherent bigotry in our voting system and immigration system, I encourage them to read my book because it's pretty obviously racist. The larger the 30,000 foot answer I have to that listener is that if you want to go bridge some gaps, be my guest.

Again, I was not put on this earth to convince white people to be better. The white people who are already better know that I'm not talking about them. The white people who are already better know what I'm talking about and are trying to pull the rope in the direction that I'm trying to pull it. They don't need my blessing. They don't need my imprimatur of, "Oh, you're really a good white one. It's okay." They don't need that. They're already there. The white folks who do need that, who do need a Black guy to come on and be like, "Oh, I see, Mr. Liberal white man, you're trying your best." Again, I don't got time for that.

There are other Black people who will do that for them. That is not why I'm here. I am here to try to get people to understand how these laws actually work. Again, what these people actually said when they were passing them. Again, I'm not making it up. I researched the book. I put the actual original source and the original quotes in the text. You can just read what they said and decide for yourself if you think what they did was right. I happen to think that they were wrong.

Brian: Elie Mystal is our guest. His new book is Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, just published by The New Press. Those of you who would like to hear more Elie Mystal might be interested to know that he has an event at the Center for Brooklyn History tonight at 6:30 with Christina Greer from Fordham, another sometimes guest on this show. We'll put a link to with more info on our website if you want to find out more about it there. It's free.

Center for Brooklyn History tonight at 6:30, Ellie Mystal with Christina Greer on the new book. We're going to take a short break and come back and spend our last few minutes with Elie Mystal previewing a-- I don't even know what the word is in terms of American history. Let's say monumental. Let's say consequential. Let's say-- I don't know.

Elie: I have a word, but I also can't say it on the radio.

Brian: Yes, that thing coming up between Trump and many courts who are, for the moment, blocking some Trump policies. The season coming up at the Supreme Court on some of those. Stay with us.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Another few minutes with Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation, as well as author of his new book, Bad Law. Elie, I'm just going to go down a list that Bloomberg News posted of cases now in the court system that are likely or at least fairly likely to wind up this spring at the Supreme Court. Fired workers, various fired workers under Trump and DOGE. That's one without going into specifics. Birthright citizenship, we know what that is.

Teacher training, says another dispute ripe to reach the high court is over the administration's attempt to terminate more than 100 teacher training and recruitment grants because the programs violate Trump's policies against DEI. Funding freeze, push to dismantle or scale back federal spending in various departments that have been authorized by Congress. Resettling refugees, various aspects of DOGE activity, whether that's constitutional the way it's been set up.

Agency firings, the Justice Department has already signaled plans to ask the Supreme Court to reverse decades old precedents that limit the president's power to remove independent agency heads. Those are the ones on the list. There may even be more. Can the Supreme Court take up all of those this session? Just give us your sense of how monumental a season it's going to be given the "shock and awe" that the Trump administration is approaching seemingly every aspect of government with all at once.

Elie: They can take up all of them. I think what's going to happen this season is that the Supreme Court will be exposed as feckless. From 30,000 feet, here's a rubric to understand what I think Roberts is doing. I wrote about this in The Nation if you prefer to read it. Roberts is trying to avoid a direct confrontation with Trump over the law because Roberts knows he will lose. Roberts knows that Trump will defy his order just like Trump has already defied lower court orders. Roberts knows that he will lose a one-on-one fight with Trump, and so he is spending all of his time trying to avoid it.

The way that is going to look when it hits the Supreme Court is that what you will see is a series of finger-wagging by Roberts and some of the other conservatives. Not Alito and Thomas, but Roberts, maybe a little bit from Barrett, maybe a little bit from Kavanaugh, where they say, "No, no, no, I don't like how the procedure that you went through to do this thing that you can do, that you can still do, that we are going to rule either the law unconstitutional or we're going to kick it back to you to give you a second bite at the apple to try to do it in the legal way, but fundamentally, you can do these things. We just don't like your process." Is what Roberts is going to say on any issue where Trump has already physical control.

When I say physical, I do truly mean the military and the paramilitary forces at his disposal. When it's a situation where all he has to do is kidnap an immigrant and put him on a plane, Roberts isn't going to say boo. Roberts isn't going to stop him because he can't, because Trump will just ignore. Roberts doesn't have an army. When it comes to firing people in the federal government, Roberts isn't going to stop him because he can't. He doesn't have an army. Trump does. Roberts is going to avoid all those confrontations.

Now, when it's a situation where Trump cannot do what he wants to do unless other state and local officials carry out his bidding, then you might see some pushback from the Supreme Court. I think specifically about the City of New York case where he's suing Kathy Hochul over congestion pricing and whatnot, Trump can't win that unless Hochul does what he says. If Roberts backs Hochul, if Roberts backs New York in that situation, Trump can't ignore that court order unless he's willing to put boots on the ground crossing the GW.

Brian: One more, and we just have a minute left. This seems to me that it may be the biggest one of all that overarches all the other cases that we just cited. Here's an MSNBC headline. Incensed over legal losses, Trump asked Supreme Court to end "interbranch power grab." This is where it says, in the two months since Inauguration Day, district courts have issued more than 40 injunctions or temporary restraining orders against the executive branch. The question is, will the Supreme Court acquiesce to limiting the authority of its own branch of government? We have 20 seconds.

Elie: He's got four votes to do that already. The question is whether or not Roberts or Barrett will go along. I think Roberts is so desperate to preserve his power. He will say that he's not going along but still create the conditions where Trump can do what he wants.

Brian: Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation and author of the new book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. Elie, we always appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Elie: Thanks so much for having me. Sorry to blow up your text lines.

Brian: [chuckles] Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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