Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener. Later in the show: Elie Mystal, the Nation’s Justice correspondent, will talk about popular laws that are ruining America, starting with our voter registration regulations.  But first — the amazing response Bernie and AOC have been getting on their anti-oligarchy tour.  John Nichols will comment on that, and on the first big election of 2025. That’s coming up, in a minute.
It’s been an amazing week for resistance rallies and events, and the first big election of the year is underway now in Wisconsin. For comment, we turn to John Nichols – of course, he’s National Affairs Correspondent for The Nation. We reached him today at home in Madison. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: Great to be with you, Jon.

JW: Bernie Sanders and AOC are on their ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ tour. In Denver last weekend, they had the biggest political event there since Obama in 2008. 30,000 people in Denver. I think it was also the biggest rally of Bernie’s life, bigger than anything during his presidential campaigns. And the day before that, they had something like 20,000 people in Phoenix. What’s going on here?

JN: This is a transformative moment in our politics, where the energy that you see associated with a presidential campaign is now associating with – and even extending forward on – a movement campaign. We’ve kind of waited for a moment like this in America. So what’s at stake? Look, the bottom line is Democrats in Washington fumbled badly in the first month or so, almost two months coming off the Trump inaugural. They weren’t up to speed. They couldn’t figure out how to block his nominees. Many in the Senate actually went along with one of his biggest initiatives, and there was profound frustration and I think a sense of rootlessness, almost a lack of direction for people who opposed Trump and they didn’t know what to do. At a fundamental level, I think they decided to do it themselves, and you started seeing people showing up at town hall meetings. You started seeing folks organize protests and rallies.

And what was amazing about it was it flew so under the radar that people didn’t – in Washington, a lot of our media didn’t see that a mass opposition movement was growing. And what Sanders has done, over the last month, he was one of the first people to go out and start to rally people back in February. What Sanders has done is brought attention to something that was starting already, and what we recognize is it’s I think, bigger than anybody imagined. Sanders’ first events in Omaha and Iowa City drew a few thousand. Now we’re talking tens of thousands.

JW: Bernie and AOC are getting the biggest crowds, but other progressive leaders of the Democrats have also been leading rallies on the road this past weekend. Here in California, for example, Ro Khanna held big events in three red districts. He had over a thousand people in Anaheim, in Norco, which is south of Riverside, and another big one in Bakersfield. The Ro Khanna events last weekend were sponsored in part by the unions, the nurses, ASME, SEIU, the UAW, and our friends in the progressive organizations, MoveOn, Working Families party, the Sunrise Movement, Our Revolution and Indivisible. And it’s not just Ro Khanna. Tim Walz has been doing town halls in Republican districts in Minnesota. He was in Rochester over the weekend, his old district, a thousand people showed up.

Last week, he was across the state line in Eau Claire, where it’s a formerly Democratic district, won narrowly by a Republican. Before that, he went to his home state of Nebraska to Lincoln. He’s going to Houston on Thursday. Jamie Raskin did a town hall last weekend in a Republican district in Maryland. Indivisible is organizing more than a dozen empty chair town halls across the country, Raleigh, Central Ohio. These empty chair town halls seem to be hitting a nerve.

JN: Yeah, they really are. And the first person who really did one of them – I shouldn’t say the first, but one of the very first was Congressman Mark Pocan from Wisconsin. He initially did it somewhat cautiously. He organized a town hall on the edge of his district, right next to the Republican district next door and invited the Republican Congressman. The Republican Congressman didn’t come. In fact, blew up on him and got mad at him and that. So Pocan then said, “Okay, let’s go for it.” And went over across the district line into a community called Viroqua, Wisconsin. And Viroqua is a city of about 4,000 people. They’ve got one big venue, which is the movie theater, the old movie theater in the middle of town.
And the people who asked him, asked Pocan to come and asked their Congressman, Derrick Van Orden, the Republican, to come and set up chairs on the stage. Pocan accepted, Van Orden did not. They took a risk. They literally rented this big theater, and I went out to see what happened, and I was just blown away. When it came into Viroqua, there was a traffic jam. You got into the theater; it was packed. Pocan and many of these other members who are going to these events aren’t just giving a speech. They’re actually taking testimony. Right? They’re listening to people. And that was what happened in Viroqua, the huge portion of it, and it was poignant and powerful. There were people, parents of young people who need Medicaid, teachers, farmers, many farmers talking about how the USAID cuts had a dramatic impact on farmers and on rural communities.

End result is that you’re seeing people who aren’t usually in the spotlight being brought into the spotlight by these events, highlighting the fundamental concern. And if I could tell you one thing, Jon, boy, threat to Social Security is electric out there. People are really, really scared about what Musk and Trump are already doing and what they might do.

JW: And there’s a big national coordinated day of protests coming up Saturday, April 5th. It’s going to center in Washington at the monument with the theme, Hands Off, Hands Off Medicaid, Hands Off Medicare, Hands Off Social Security. And then there’s local events being organized everywhere on Saturday, April 5th. Here in LA where I live, there’s going to be protests not only Downtown LA, but in Culver City, Glendale, Torrance, Pasadena, and farther afield, and Riverside, Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, pretty much anywhere. I checked Minnesota, April 5th in Minnesota, there’ll be rallies not only at the state capital, but Hands Off events in Duluth, Rochester, Mankato, Winona and in Bemidji at the Paul Bunyan statue.

JN: I’ve been to the Paul Bunyan statue. It’s quite imposing and powerful, and there’s a good chance Bemidji is still going to be frozen at the time. The lake there is still going to be frozen, but you’re naming all the big cities, brother. I want to tell you, have you ever heard of Walworth, Wisconsin?

JW: Never.

JN: Walworth is where my mom lives, and it’s out in a county that hasn’t voted democratic. I don’t even think that went for LBJ in ’64.

JW: Oh, my goodness.

JN: This is a Republican county, and I just heard they’re having a big Hands Off event in Walworth, and that’s a town of about 2,000. I really can’t begin to emphasize, Jon, you and I have critiqued media a lot on this show, and we have often said the media is slow to catch up. I cannot emphasize how slow national media has been. Even media that’s somewhat critical of Trump and Musk in catching up with the reality that there is something incredible going on out there across America. This is turning into a sort of next gen tea party on the other side of the political equation. Again, different dynamics, and I understand a lot of that covered the tea party a great deal, but what I’m seeing is something that is very real. It is very energized.
And if I can add one final element of it, when I went to that Viroqua event, they had two chairs in the corner of this huge theater, and they had a sign above it that said, “These chairs are reserved for paid agitators who are coming here because some group made them come.” They were joking about it because the reality is that the crowd in Viroqua everybody who came up and spoke said, “I come from this township. I live in this village. I grew up in this part of Vernon County.” These were not outsiders. These aren’t people being bused in or trucked in. That is the last desperate Republican attempt to deny this reality. The fact is people are organizing where they live, and there are a lot of them.

JW: And another front that’s been surprising is that we’ve talked about it before here recently, the Tesla Takedown. They are aiming to hold a National Day of Action this Saturday, March 29th. They’re targeting over 277 Tesla stores and supercharger stations. The Tesla takedown seems to be getting to Musk and to Trump.

JN: Yeah, there’s very little question that they’ve been shaken by not just the Tesla takedown protests, but by the drop in Tesla stock value by the general sense that a tremendous number of Americans look at Elon Musk now as a negative force, and they don’t want to be associated with him. And the Tesla Takedown protests, the people who have been organizing have said very much, they want them to be nonviolent. They want them to be classic civil disobedience. Trump and Musk have tried to portray them as entirely horrible, entirely awful. The fact is there’s a lot of sincere people who are out there and who again, really want this to be a classic non-violent protest against not just Elon Musk, but also against corporate power. And so that’s become a huge element of this moment.

JW: Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, early voting is now underway for a special election, April 1st, to elect a new State Supreme Court Justice. The liberal candidate is Susan Crawford, a county judge. The Republicans are running the former State Attorney General, a guy named Brad Schimel. Schimel has won statewide office twice. Susan Crawford has never run a statewide campaign before. Trump carried the state last November. That seems to suggest it’s an uphill fight for the liberals.

JN: I think that that is not the case. It’s a real fight and a close fight. I’m not necessarily sure it’s uphill. Remember, progressives have won Supreme Court races in Wisconsin three times, basically in 2018, 2020 and 2023. So they’ve had a pretty good cycle on doing this. I think they’re pretty good at it. What’s different this time, and it is dramatically different, is the Musk money. We’re talking about an inflow of – I think we’re already looking at around $14 million right now from Musk, and that’s huge. That’s the largest amount of money spent by an individual or by groups associated with an individual in a Wisconsin Supreme Court race ever.

JW: I think anywhere in the country ever.

JN: This is going to be more expensive than any Supreme Court race in history, but what’s notable is $14 million, $12 million, $14 million. That’s more, significantly more than what whole races for Supreme Court used to cost just a few years ago. So there’s been this exponential increase in spending, and that makes it uncertain, right? You don’t know what’s going to happen, but what I can tell you is that the Musk money and his political presence has become a real issue in the state, and I don’t think it’s helping the conservative candidate much.

The other element of this that’s worthy of note is that there was one debate in the race between the two candidates. Susan Crawford, the progressive candidate, just did dramatically better than Brad Schimel, the more conservative candidate, and that’s been noted. Even Republican friends of mine will say that, or maybe off the record. There’s plenty of energy on the progressive side in this race, and it’s going to be a huge test, frankly. It’s a bottom-line test. Can a progressive candidate who has funding, plenty of money, money coming from grassroots donations, and also from some wealthy folks, can such a candidate take on a conservative who has a great deal of money, and also has this separate side campaign coming from Musk? Because Musk’s money is going into a lot of so-called independent expenditures. If Susan Crawford, the progressive wins, I think it’s going to be a huge message that comes out of Wisconsin. I think it’ll be very, very influential on our politics, not just for Democrats, but also for some Republicans who’ve been very afraid of Musk. They’ll see, ‘Wow, you can beat Musk money.’

If on the other hand, Brad Schimel, the conservative wins, then I think the message will be a very jarring one, and that is that these huge inflows of money can have a dramatic impact anywhere. So a lot is at stake. This is a critical election, and it is an absolutely clear choice. In fact, Susan Crawford, the progressive candidate, is even openly running against Trump and Musk, whereas Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate, is very openly embracing Trump. A little more cautious about Musk, but you get the picture.

JW: I get the picture. One last thing – I just want to review the polls this week on Trump’s job approval ratings, which continue to fall. Since January 20th, when he took the oath of office, his approval rating has fallen 11 points. It’s now at 45% approval. He was 11 points higher than that when he took office. Among independents, we have a 13-point swing against Trump. Among Hispanics, a 25-point swing against Trump. On the approval ratings for Trump’s handling of jobs and the economy, since he took office on January 20th, there’s been a 16-point swing against Trump overall, 24-point swing against Trump among independents, a 27-point swing against Trump among 18- to 29-year-olds. And among Hispanics, on approval of handling jobs in the economy, Trump has lost 32 points among Hispanics just since January 20th. You have to say, that didn’t take long.

JN: No, it did not take long. It comes where at the federal level, there was for quite a bit of time there, an incoherence among the Democrats. So there wasn’t even a well-stated opposition necessarily. And I think they are getting better slowly, but I think what you’re really seeing here is people are actually paying attention and they’re actually feeling it. They’re saying, “This isn’t good when the stock market appears to be on a wild roller coaster.” An awful lot of Americans have 401(k) plans, and they look at the stock market and they’re saying, “But this scares me.” When farmers are seeing the impact of tariffs and the cuts to USAID, when working people in general are still feeling the pain of inflation, which was a legitimate critique when Biden was president, but it’s also a legitimate critique when Trump is president.

And so the end result is that I think that weaves together everything we’ve been talking about. The bottom line is that Americans voted narrowly for Donald Trump because they thought he could fix things. He’s been president now for a couple of months. Even the most radical anti-Trump person will acknowledge that they didn’t expect him to fix everything in a couple of months, but they didn’t think that he would make everything worse. And that has had a profound impact, that is that’s what shapes our politics.

JW: John Nichols – read him at thenation.com. John, thanks for talking with us today.

JN: It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Jon Wiener: Donald Trump, of course, is the biggest thing ruining America right now. But he’s not the only thing. We have many popular laws that are also doing that. For example, why isn’t everyone registered to vote? That’s something Elie Mystal has been thinking about. It’s the first question he asks in his new book Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. Elie is The Nation’s justice correspondent and a columnist. He’s also a fellow at the Type Media Center and a frequent guest on MSNBC. Last time he was here, we talked about his bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution. We reached him today at home in New York. Elie, welcome back.

Elie Mystal: Hi, Jon. Thanks for having me.

JW: Our first question is: why isn’t everyone registered to vote? This raises a partisan issue. Democrats want everybody registered because they assume the unregistered are more likely to vote Democratic. And Republicans pretty much agree with that assumption, and that’s why they want to make it harder to register to vote. And everybody knows the Republican’s main argument for strict voter registration laws: they are ‘necessary to prevent fraud.’ But you say that’s wrong. You say voter registration does nothing to stop voter fraud. Please explain.

EM: Yeah. Well, if you think about it this way, if you are a fraudster, if you are a committed fraudster and you are trying to steal somebody’s vote, you can do that just as easily by stealing their voter registration as you can by stealing their voter eligibility. It’s the same fraud, right? So the fact that you add a second step, if you think the first step is voter eligibility to begin with, by adding a second step of voter pre-registration, that does nothing to prevent fraud. It just makes the process that the fraudster goes through a little different than if you didn’t have the pre-registration fraud.

But Jon, you said something that I actually disagree with in the book. You said that the Democrats want everybody to be registered and the Republicans don’t. I totally agree that the Republicans don’t, but I’m not so sure the Democrats do. Various kinds of voter suppression also benefit the establishment wing of the Democratic Party and cut off opportunities for more, let’s say populist, let’s say progressive candidates to challenge Democrats in primaries across the country. I’m not so sure the Democrats are actually 100% in on my ideas of automatic universal voter registration.

JW: Of course we think of the states of the former Confederacy as the worst offenders here to making it easier to register to vote. But you say New York state provides the perfect example of how suppressive voter registration rules can be. And last time I checked, New York state was kind of a blue state. So tell us about the problems in your state.

EM: Right. New York, my home state, solidly liberal for most of my lifetime, and yet we have some of the most suppressive voter registration laws in the country. Let’s start with the obvious. You’re required to register to vote for a New York election 10 days before the election. We do not have automatic same day voter registration as they do in many other states, especially on the West Coast. That’s bad. That means that you can’t wake up on election day and be like, “You know what? I decided I actually do want to vote.” And people tend to think of that only every four years in a presidential election. And people like us, Jon, who pay a lot of attention, obviously we know that we need to pre-register to vote.

But a lot of people, especially when you’re talking about off-year elections, especially when you’re talking about state and local elections, they’re not aware of when election day is. They’re not aware of when the deadlines are. And for a lot of them, if you’re going to get them to vote at all, it’s going to be a kind of, I want to say, spontaneous thing, but you certainly want to make it as frictionless as possible for people who are not switched in 24/7 to the political news cycle to be like, ‘Hey, Jim, did you know we got the DA election this Tuesday? Why don’t we hop in our truck and go?’ You want that to be something that people can do. You can’t do that in New York State because 10-day pre-registration requirement.
But let’s go a level deeper than that, right? Think about how much stuff you need to pre-register to vote. In New York, you need your proof of address or some kind of a bill showing where you live. And that probably sounds very easy to people like me who live upstate. I got a mortgage, I’m going to be in this house for 30 years, right? If you’re a renter in New York City, you might’ve moved two months ago and having to switch your registration before every election. New York State does not have what’s called portability of registration. That means your registration does not follow you as you move. In New York, if you move from Manhattan to Queens, as many people do when they have children, if you move from Manhattan to Brooklyn, you have to re-register to vote. Technically in New York, if you move within your building from unit 4B to unit 2A, you need to re-register at your new address in your own building.

And again, what does that do? That makes it just a little bit harder for renters in New York City to vote. And that is exactly what the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, which is based on mortgage holders in the suburbs, that’s exactly what they want, which is why New York voting laws and voter registration laws are so bad. America does this differently than every other democracy in the world. We have the most restrictive and the least voter participation of nearly any other wealthy democracy, right? Other countries, most other countries either don’t have voter registration laws or have some kind of compulsory registration to try to get to the point where they have 100% registration of all eligible voters. We could do that here; we choose not to.

JW: The portability thing is not a problem in the European Union, or in Latin America. Pretty much all other nations of the world have national identity cards. The United States is almost alone in not having them. I looked this up on Google. There are only 10 countries in the world that don’t have national ID cards. These are mostly microstates and unrecognized states — and the United States. We do have social security cards. That’s a national identification. We have passports that you have to apply for if you want to travel internationally. Pretty soon, we’re going to have this thing ‘Real ID’ required for various things, including boarding an airplane. For Real ID, the conditions are set by the Department of Homeland Security — federal standards for a state issued ID card.  So we’re pretty close to having national identity cards. A national identity card would not only solve the problem of voter registration portability, it would have a single national system in which everybody would be automatically registered to vote. Why don’t we do that?

EM: Yeah, people want to make it so that we have one national system for getting on a plane, but we don’t have one national system for participating in the democracy. Tell me how that makes sense. Look, the reason why we’re like this is because of a flaw in the original constitution, right? The original constitution does not have a right to vote. There’s no federally mandated right to vote. It’s not in the constitution. It’s not in any of the 27 amendments. We just don’t have one.

JW: And let me ask a question: was that just a slip-up?

EM: [Laughter]  No, no, no, no. As you well know, the people who wrote the constitution didn’t put a right to vote in the constitution because they didn’t believe that there was a right to vote. They certainly didn’t believe Black people should be given a right to vote. They didn’t believe that women should be given a right to vote. And quite frankly, they were pretty clear that they didn’t think poor white men should have a right to vote that was equal to rich bourgeoisie white men. So the entire concept of the founders of this country was to limit the franchise to only rich white dudes.

Their theory, their thought was that voting rights flowed up from the states, not down from the federal government, so that each individual state could decide for itself who should and should not be eligible to vote. And that makes a lot of sense. Again, if you think about the constitution as constructing a western slave empire, that makes a lot of sense. Georgia is going to have very different views on who should be allowed to vote and who should be allowed to be a person than New York is, right? And so that’s why in our current – and because of that fatal flaw, that’s why we do not have one federal election system. We have 50 federal election systems, and each state has their own little Byzantine rules about who can vote and who’s eligible to vote, and when you can vote, and how early you can vote, and whether or not you can vote early at all and all of this ridiculousness. And other countries look at us and laugh.

JW: All this seems to suggest the conclusion that Elie Mystal is in favor of more liberal voter registration laws, like same-day registration, which you’ve talked about. But actually in this book, Bad Laws, you are not in favor of more liberal voter registration laws. Why not? What do you think we do need?

EM: I think we need to obliterate all voter registration laws. I don’t want to improve the laws we have; I want to obliterate the bad laws that are causing us problems. First of all, there’s already one state, North Dakota, that doesn’t have voter pre-registration. Anybody who is eligible to vote is just automatically registered to vote. We could absolutely do that here.

Look, I’m not saying that we don’t need voter eligibility requirements. There are reasons – I don’t always agree with the reasons, but there are reasons to have voter eligibility requirements. We want to say that you have to be at least 18 to vote. I might argue that you should have to be 16, but I’m not going to argue that you should be eight, right? So we can adjust that to taste.  But I understand that conceptually we need to have some kind of age barrier before somebody is eligible to vote. And I understand residency requirements and other things like that. But if you meet the eligibility requirements, you should be automatically registered to vote in whatever state you live. Period. End of story.

JW: Your big demand here is that voters should not have to prove their eligibility in order to register to vote. But how would this work if it’s not up to the individual to establish their qualifications? Who is going to establish their qualifications?

EM: It’s up to the government. The government should be able to know who’s eligible to vote and not. And it’s funny because whenever the government needs me to pay them money, they suddenly know who I am. But when it comes to a basic participation in American democracy, “Oh, how can the government know? Elie, prove who you are.”

No, no, no. It should be on the government. And look, the fundamental premise here is that voting should be frictionless, painless, easy, and free for the voter. The burden of elections should be on the government, not on the people. That’s how you get participation in your democracy.

JW: Your book is about bad laws, and you boldly identify what is the single worst law in America. What is it?

EM: Well, Jon, that is hard to choose. I mean, again, I wrote a whole book with a lot of them, right? But I think when you look at its provable racism, Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law is the most provably racist law we have on the books, in terms of how that law allows the white killing of Black people. There is no law that we have more empirical evidence for that is racist than Stand Your Ground.

JW: You support a ‘Duty to Retreat.’ That sounds like cowardice, weakness. Where did you get this idea?

EM: I did not come up with a duty to retreat. England came up with a duty to retreat. That’s an old common law concept. And while I know it sounds cowardly, it’s actually moral. It’s actually the moral answer. The point of the duty to retreat as it was developed in England and was developed in America from the founding going forward is the idea that if you are confronted with deadly force and you can escape safely, safely is a big part of this duty here, but if you can escape safely, then you should. And so in the classic situation, if somebody pulls a gun on you and you can just walk away, you should walk away. Now if somebody pulls a gun on you and they’re not going to let you walk away, now we’re in a different situation. If you’re cornered, now we’re in a different situation.

But if somebody pulls a gun on you, the safest thing to do is to just walk away if you can, not to pull out your own gun, start shooting back and forth and see which one of you is Billy the Kid. That’s not safe, that’s idiotic. The analogy that I use in the book, Jon, it’s like, if there’s a fire in your house and you can safely leave your house and get all your family and your pets and your children out, you should leave. Don’t stay in your house and show the fire who’s boss with your Brita water filter. That’s stupid. Just leave if you can. If you can’t, we’re in a different situation.

JW: Florida has this thing called the Stand Your Ground law. What is Florida’s view of the situation you’ve just described?

EM: That if you are confronted with deadly force and you can safely escape, you should not escape. You should pull out your gun and shoot the person who’s confronting you with deadly force. Florida’s law is an open season. It’s a wild, wild west law of anybody that steps to you, you got a right to kill them where they stand. And while that might sound masculine, and I get that there is a toxic masculinity appeal to Stand Your Ground, but all it does, all it has resulted in is the needless killing of Black folks. Because the application of Stand Your Ground turns out to be extremely racist. When a white person shoots a Black person, when the white person claims that the Black person was threatening them, that white person is acquitted 218% more often than when a Black person shoots a white person under the exact same circumstances.
So what it means is that if a white person is threatening me in Florida and I’m Black and I stand my ground, I’m still probably going to jail. But if I’m threatening a white person or if the white person simply claims that I’m threatening them and they shoot me to death, that white person is going home. And that kind of racial disparity is not just, to my mind, unconstitutional, it is a moral failure of the state of Florida, and frankly, the country as a whole.

JW: There are so many obstacles to getting the results that we want from voting. We know them all — the electoral college, the Senate, the Supreme Court. But you say at the end of your book, “It’s always worth it to vote.” I have to point out that 90 million people disagreed with you last November. More eligible people did not vote than voted for either candidate. So how do you explain to those people it’s always worth it to vote?

EM: Yeah. So Jon, I don’t think that that’s my job. It is the job of candidates to explain to people who are choosing the couch over voting why they are good enough candidates to vote for. And I actually think that if candidates spent more time talking about what they are going to do differently in terms of policy, that might inspire more people to vote.

I understand that a lot of times, the choice seems between bad and worse. I understand that for a lot of people, a lot of time, the choice seems between the lesser of two evils. But an intelligent adult is still able to pick between the lesser of two evils. There’s always a lesser, and it’s always worth it to pick the lesser. Even if it’s between two uninspiring candidates, it’s still possible to pick the better of bad options. That’s what adults do all the time.

And for a lot of these 90 million non-voters, it’s like you go through your life all the time choosing between two options you don’t like, sometimes between five options you don’t like. You still make a choice because you’re a grown ass adult. Same with voting. Voting is not a love letter. It is a just basic civic responsibility and duty and opportunity to have some kind of influence over the political process. And so I say people should do it all the time.

JW: Your book on Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America ends by quoting, not George Washington, not Abraham Lincoln; you end by quoting Scrooge McDuck. What did he say that you found insightful?

EM: Scrooge McDuck might be a billionaire oligarch that I would spend my Nation life opposing. However, he gave me one immeasurable pearl of political wisdom. Scrooge McDuck tells the little ducklings, “Don’t work harder, work smarter.” When I heard that, I was eight or nine.  It was just like an epiphany for me. Yes, work smarter, not harder.

And so just as we were talking about voting, Jon, I never just want to tell people to vote harder. As much as we want to talk about the 90 million people who didn’t vote, there were millions and millions of people who did vote, millions and millions of people who voted against the current fascist dictatorship in our country.  And I don’t want to say, “Just vote harder, vote more,” right? No, no. Vote smarter. And the reason why I wrote the book is to give people more information about the policies and statutes and laws at play so that they might be able to vote smarter when the candidates pull out their laws and their policies and their prescriptions for our future.

JW: Elie Mystal – his new book is Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. You can read his column at thenation.com. Elie, thanks for this book — and thanks for talking with us today.

EM: Thank you so much for having me.