The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) platform contains shockingly dangerous proposals that, if implemented, would do away with the Constitution as we know it. I don’t say that for effect—I say it based on a plain reading of their platform, confirmed on the record by their own spokesperson.
Earlier this week, when Shannon Bream sat down with DSA co-chair Megan Romer on Fox News Sunday and read the platform back to her line by line, Romer didn’t hedge. She confirmed it: Abolish the Senate. Replace the presidency. Replace the Supreme Court. Abolish ICE. Erase the border and grant mass amnesty. Defund the Pentagon. Phase out prisons.
Romer called the Senate “an anachronistic institution,” modeled on the British House of Lords, “part of the system that was made to make sure that the people didn’t have too much of a say,” and said the DSA wants a unicameral legislature in its place. The platform itself doesn’t dress this up—it calls for an “executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Subordinate. Not checked. Not balanced. Subordinate.
Court-packing, dangerous as it is, is too pedestrian for them. The DSA would obliterate the structural Constitution—the separation of powers, the checks and balances, the parts of our government’s blueprint that are even more critical to the protection of the rights of citizens than the Bill of Rights itself. As I’ve noted before, this is a point Justice Scalia regularly made. On paper, he pointed out, the Soviet Constitution promised more than ours does. Its provisions supposedly protected rights including the “freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, meetings, street processions and demonstrations,” the “freedom of conscience,” and “the right . . . to criticize” government institutions. There was also this: “Persecution for criticism is prohibited.” But as the late justice observed,
They are what the Framers of our Constitution called “parchment guarantees,” because the real constitutions of those countries—the provisions that establish the institutions of government—do not prevent the centralization of power in one man or one party, thus enabling the guarantees to be ignored. Structure is everything.
That is the difference between a constitutional republic and totalitarianism, and it’s precisely the difference the DSA platform proposes to erase. As Senator Ted Cruz aptly put it, “That is not democracy. It is a politburo. And when the politburo controls the Court, your constitutional rights disappear.”
The DSA isn’t using the Abigail Spanberger playbook, where she pretends to be moderate and then governs like a radical. They’re shouting the quiet part out loud, on television and in their own platform’s language. And they’re no longer on the margins of the Democratic coalition. DSA-backed candidates have been winning primaries in droves this cycle. They secured overwhelming victories in New York’s recent congressional and state-level primaries. DSA-aligned candidates have also won congressional primaries in Pennsylvania and Colorado, and the mayoral primary in Washington, D.C. Add Zohran Mamdani, the DSA’s own man now running the nation’s largest city, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House, and this is not a marginal faction. It’s a growing bloc in the Democratic Party.
That’s not to say that the DSA will achieve its destructive constitutional aims immediately. Abolishing the Senate, for instance, is virtually impossible under Article V’s amendment procedures. But do these radicals who are openly disdainful of the Constitution sound like the sort of people to let mere unconstitutionality stop them if they thought they had the political power to achieve their goals? And the inconvenient reality of constitutional text hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to rewrite its guarantee of life tenure for federal judges. It’s no wonder they want to discredit and abolish the Supreme Court—that’s the institution whose job it is to enforce our constitutional structure.
Today’s Democratic Party doesn’t tolerate moderation. Remember their push to abolish the filibuster to achieve such constitutionally dubious ends as codifying Roe v. Wade, passing the Green New Deal, making D.C. a state, and federalizing elections? Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema were the last Democrats willing to publicly defend the legislative filibuster, and their own party drove them out of the Senate.
As the socialists advance with even more radical proposals, who would be left in a future Democratic Senate to stand up to their own party? The fringe Left ascendant in the Democratic Party is listening to what the DSA has to say. Are you?