By Blake Maddux

“I didn’t want to write just another “orange man bad” book. I wanted to remind people that the world exists in the way that it does on purpose. We have chosen to live this way. We could choose tomorrow to NOT live this way and things would be better.”

Whether you know him as the legal correspondent for The Nation, his guest spots on various television and radio programs, or his first book, Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, then Elie Mystal’s literal and figurative voice is unmistakable to you.

He now brings that articulate, foul-mouthed, pop culture-referencing approach to bear in a brand new book, Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, which The New Press published on March 25.

In this readable, enjoyable, and informative volume, Mystal applies his Harvard College and Harvard Law bona fides and “biased as fuck” perspective to an exploration of the statutes that “have an outsized detrimental impact on ordinary people,” or, as he phrases it in his trademark manner, “piss [him] off the most.” Mystal believes that the process to repeal them is far from arduous, given that doing so would mean life would be so much better tomorrow for so many. (However, he concedes that ridding the Constitution of one particular amendment would be substantially more laborious.)

On March 31, Mystal will return to his old Cambridge stomping grounds to discuss Bad Law with Kimberly Atkins Stohr at Harvard Book Store.

Before doing so, however, he kindly spoke to me by phone for a conversation from which I excerpted the following Q&A.

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The Arts Fuse: I pat myself on the back for fully appreciating the title of your first book. Why did you decide to go with a more straightforward title for this one?

Elie Mystal: My publisher decided to go a little more straightforward because we’re in a different time. We’re in a more, I think, dangerous time. So I didn’t want to, if you will, gate the book behind people with my particular Gen X sensibility. And the tagline of the first book is “A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.” But as I said many times before, it was not a guide to the Constitution for Black people. It was my lens on the Constitution. But I did find that there was a bit of gating in that there were some white readers who were like, “Well, is this book really for me?” Yes, dammit! So the new book definitely has my Black perspective, but I decided not to put that in the title this time just to make it more inclusive and nice.

AF: Why do you describe these laws as the ones that “piss me off the most”?

Mystal: The hardest thing about this book was scoping it. There are tons of bad laws, many of them are stupid, and I haven’t read them all. So trying to whittle down with laws I’m going to focus on was the first challenge of the book. So the first decision that I made was to focus on laws that I thought could be repealed. Not replaced, not reformed, not massaged, not updated for the modern age, and there are a lot of laws like that. So the laws that I focus on are the ones that I feel can be straight up stricken from the record and things will be better tomorrow.

And then the second scope was which of these laws actually bothered me. Actually just pisses me off. That’s why you get the airline chapter, which was literally the first chapter that I wrote. And I kind of scoped that while literally sitting on a plane being delayed to get back to my gate. That’s a law that’s bothered me ever since I was old enough to understand what it did.

AF: You write that these laws can be “easily solved by simple repeal.” How so?

Mystal: None of the laws in the book are required by any sort of constitutional language. You could just get rid of all 10. All it takes to repeal any of these laws is an act of Congress. Passes the Congress, passes the Senate, signed by the president and boom, it’s gone. That’s part of why I wanted to write this book in this way at this moment. I didn’t want to write just another “orange man bad” book. I wanted to remind people that the world exists in the way that it does on purpose. We have chosen to live this way. We could choose tomorrow to NOT live this way and things would be better. So that’s the sort of intellectual scoping of the book.

AF: You are critical of the late Ted Kennedy and believe that Joe Biden was sometimes “very, very wrong” in voting the way that he did. In what ways did Democrats contribute to bad laws?

Mystal: I started as I always do when I am looking for bad things in the country by asking, “Where are the Republicans? Bring me the Republicans who are responsible for this.” In the course of researching this book, I kept seeing again and again Democrats supporting the laws, Democrats spearheading the effort, Democrats getting the vote over the line. I call the book “Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America” because all of these laws were extremely popular when they were passed. So the book ended up being not just an attack on Republican evildoers kind of twirling their mustaches trying to figure out how to ruin the country. It was also wrestling with the impacts of neoliberalism on the Democratic Party and how that has led the entire party astray in their belief in letting the market provide fundamental governmental services.

AF: Is it still cool with you that Biden became president?

Mystal: I think that Joe Biden was the better president than the alternative. I am not one of these people who has a problem choosing the lesser of two evils. There’s always a lesser evil. In terms of Biden’s approach and long senatorial history, Biden is the author and progenitor of some terrible, terrible bills and laws, especially in the realm of criminal justice. And I don’t think he ever fully understood why he was wrong and how desperately wrong he was. But the rest of us have the opportunity to be better than Joe Biden and understand where he made mistakes and try to undo the harm that he helped cause.

AF: How did the ineffectualness of the 15th Amendment manifest itself in the near century of its existence prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965?

Mystal: We fought a war over whether Black people got to be people. And Black people won. Go us. And we then passed three Reconstruction amendments trying to fix the Constitution so we can get citizenship and political rights, civil rights, and voting rights for formerly enslaved people.

The original Constitution has no protection for the right to vote. That is a flaw in the original Constitution, and that is something that I talk about a lot in my first book. With this book, what I’m trying to point out is that even after we ratified the 15th Amendment, states just ignored it. That is something that we see a lot in Constitutional law. An amendment is only as good as the statute passed to enforce it, and there was no statute passed to enforce the 15th Amendment until the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That is why I call it the single most important piece of legislation in American history. Nothing before it took us from an apartheid state — where not everyone who lives here is allowed to vote — to something that at least on paper is a full, fair, and equal democracy. It also gave legal protections to Black women trying to vote. The 19th Amendment didn’t mean crap for Black women until the passage of the 1965 VRA.

AF: You have used the term “fascist dictatorship” to describe the government under Trump. How is that not hyperbolic?

EM: Fascist dictatorship is exactly what we are experiencing under Donald Trump. I don’t know a definition of fascism or dictatorship that does not apply to what he is doing. Trump is in direct violation of court orders. That means that he and he only believes that he and he only is above the law. That the law exists on his whims, not on the will of the people, and that is tyrannical. I use similar and strong language in the book, too, but as I say in the intro, the goal of my book is not to persuade people who disagree with me. My goal is to inspire and inform people who already agree with me. People who are already doing what they can to pull the rope in the same direction that I am, and to arm them with better arguments and more information.

AF: I think that I saw a post from you not too long ago about how you and a fairly visible Republican senator went to Harvard Law together. Who was it and what was your relationship?

EM: Yeah, I had some run-ins with Sen. Tom Cotton [R-AR] at Harvard Law School. I didn’t really know him at Harvard Law School, I just hated him at Harvard Law School. And he knew me and hated me and we would fight occasionally. Not physically fight, you know, but debate and throw jabs at each other around the quad, as it were.

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Blake Maddux is a freelance journalist who regularly contributes to the Arts Fuse, Somerville Times, and Beverly Citizen. He has also written for DigBoston, the ARTery, Lynn Happens, the Providence Journal, The Onion’s A.V. Club, and the Columbus Dispatch. A native Ohioan, he moved to Boston in 2002 and currently lives with his wife and seven-year-old twins — Elliot Samuel and Xander Jackson — in Salem, MA.