OF COURSE I KNEW who Elie Mystal was when I started this early in February, he's a good writer and I agree with most of what he says so wonderfully forcefully. But I had no idea he was going to publish a book several weeks after I started going through Louis Boudin's book, motivated by the Kavanaugh gerrymandering decision in early February. I didn't know he was writing a book that would make some similar points to the ones Boudin and others that I have made so, no, I'm not "just copying him."
Neither do I think he's copying anything I've written on this in the past. I doubt he's aware of what I post here. I've been slamming the Supreme Court for decades, for the past two, online. I've been slamming the claim that the Constitution allows them to overturn duly enacted Federal laws, even before when I mistakenly thought that it was John Marshall who had made that particular power grab - before I'd read Louis Boudin's article then book on the topic and found out it was the putrid Roger B. Taney and his fellow "justices" in the Dred Scott decision.
I welcome anyone with his audience who gives People encouragement to break out of the idolatrous worship of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and, most of all the Supreme Court. I welcome him pointing out that if there's one thing we know beyond any doubt it is that the Roberts Court or future Courts like it will nullify any law they want to no matter if it's the Voting Rights Act, the John Lewis Voting Protection Act, encoding Roe vs. Wade into federal law, etc. The out of control "justices" are laws unto themselves and any five of them will be a Constitutional Convention unto themselves adding to and ripping up any part of the Constitution they feel like it at any time and, as long as they give any bullshit, lying form in lieu of evidence or reasoned logic, AS LONG AS THE POLITICAL BRANCHES GO ALONG WITH THIS it is held to be the law of the land.
I'm, actually, more radical than Mystal is on these issues, from what I've heard about his book, from him and those who have read it. I think that it's absolutely necessary to put in the Constitution that free speech-press, well and good but there is no right to lie and that individuals who are lied about in the media, including DEMOCRATIC OFFICE HOLDERS, APPOINTEES, ETC. should be able to sue with effective disincentives for the media to lie about them. He and Joan Walsh - as journalists, both having a professional interest in the status quo on that - will point to a piece of Republican-fascist racist crap like Jeff Sessions as AG or the infamous Gawker suit but I'll point out that Sessions got to be AG BECAUSE THE NEW YORK TIMES, NPR, . . . . down to the gutter levels of FOX etc. lied about Hillary Clinton with impunity. I will also point out that if Gawker had been more careful NOT to carry what got them sued BECAUSE THEY COULDN'T DEMONSTRATE ITS VERACITY it wouldn't have been driven into extinction. The convenience of the media not having to fact check and back up what they say is no reason for the rest of us to get a Donald Trump because that convenience for would be good journalists is worth the susceptible buying the lies sold along with that. I am not a journalist, I don't care for the media privileges that the idiots who wrote the First Amendment misnamed rights. I don't care for any of that except when it serves equality and democracy and decency.
No, I love Elie Mystal but any conclusions we share we probably either came to them independently or through reading the same authors.
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