Bad law Ten popular laws that are ruining America

Mystal (Allow Me to Retort), the Nation's legal analyst and justice correspondent, sharply critiques the current state of American democracy in this acerbic discussion of 10 laws that he argues must be repealed because of the "massive social or political harm" they cause. He asserts that all of them, which include restrictions on voter registration and rules holding criminals liable for deaths that arise from attempted felonies, are "just as bigoted, ignorant, and unfair as redlining." A few of the chapters cover familiar ground, such as stand-your-ground laws and laws enforcing right-wing school curricula, but Mystal also makes some less intuitive connections. For instance, he links the rise of neoliberalism to the 1978 enactment of the Airline Deregulation Act, pinpointing it as "the moment when the Democratic Party turned its back" on the New Deal and the Great Society and "instead adopted the language of free market, unregulated claptrap pushed by capitalist thugs." Mystal concludes by perceptively positing that the fundamental reform required as a prerequisite for all the others is to make American democracy more representative by mandating that each congressperson represent as few people as Wyoming's population of 580,000 (which would currently add 158 new members). This cuts through the noise of left-wing infighting to serve as an actionable guide to meaningful change. (Mar.)

A cheerfully profane assault on laws that, by constitutional scholar and commentator Mystal's account, need to be shredded. "We live in a dystopian fucking future where Amazon knows that I need to buy new underwear before I do, but we're supposed to pretend that it is difficult for the U.S. government to know if I'm eligible to vote?" So asks Mystal, opposing voter ID and other registration laws: Anything else, he insists, is an untoward effort on the part of the white majority-cum-minority to restrict voting rights on the part of anyone who's not them. Just so, he insists, immigration laws are overblown, assuming that immigrants are "as violent and depraved as Trump," though he harbors little hope of change: Whites will declare citizen Latinos to be white enough to help them close the border, and Latinos "will reward them by voting Republican" and repressing Latinos on the other side of the fence. Some of Mystal's examples wander into areas few readers will likely have thought about. His analysis of airline deregulation is richly detailed, but in the end it comes to a full-throated denunciation of a market system in which there are very few winners (and those who "vote with your wallet," he notes, need wallets thick enough to make their targets pay attention). Mystal mounts persuasive arguments against such things as laws that remove discretionary power from judges, school choice that allows conservative parents to dictate curricula that accommodates "their bigoted, unscientific, private predilections," and much else that is fundamentally antidemocratic. He concludes with the provocative--and promising--suggestion that apportionment of congressional seats be for every 580,000 persons, meaning Wyoming gets its representative but California gets a dozen more, which "would go a long way toward restoring basic representative democracy in this country." A smart, big-picture takedown of the legal bulwarks of white supremacism and its privileges. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.