Elie Mystal, an MSNBC legal commentator, is taking issue with the U.S. Constitution.
Mystal appeared on ABC’s “The View” Friday to discuss his new book “Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution.”
Co-host Ana Navarro said, “Some will say, ‘Ok, so are you arguing for throwing out the Constitution?’ Should the Constitution be thrown out? What do we do? Is it a living document or is it a sacred document?”
“It’s certainly not sacred,” Mystal responded. “The Constitution is kind of trash. Again, let’s just talk as adults for a second.”
Joy Behar interjected to clarify what he called the Constitution.
“It’s kind of trash,” Mystal answered. “It was written by slavers and colonists and white people who were willing to make deals with slavers and colonists.”
He added, “They didn’t ask anybody who looked like me what they thought about the Constitution.”
Watch the video below:
"The Constitution is kind of trash," said @ElieNYC on #TheView. pic.twitter.com/9wLkME7i9l
— Mediaite (@Mediaite) March 4, 2022
A description of Mystal’s book says it is “an easily digestible argument about what rights we have, what rights Republicans are trying to take away, and how to stop them. Mystal explains how to protect the rights of women and people of color instead of cowering to the absolutism of gun owners and bigots.”
“He strips out all of the fancy jargon conservatives like to hide behind and lays bare the truth of their project to keep America forever tethered to its slaveholding past,” the description adds.
In an interview earlier this week, Mystal said, “If we could throw that out and start over with a new document that was more inclusive of everybody, that was written by everybody — at no point have Black people, brown people, or women had a say in actually writing the Constitution or the amendments to that Constitution — if we could throw that and have a delegation of all Americans to write a new one, I would be all for that.”
Elie Mystal (@ElieNYC): It’d be great to “throw out the Constitution altogether” and create something “more inclusive” pic.twitter.com/9RiI2Bw9s5
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 3, 2022
However, he made clear that he does not believe such a re-writing of the Constitution would happen in the U.S.
