The American progressive activist group Democratic Socialists of America has released a new, updated platform on their website, titled Workers Deserve More. It is calling for some quite radical changes to the United States political system, which has, in turn, drawn some attention from the media.
Their calls for abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College are what made it into most headlines.
Under the agenda point ‘Democratic Congress,’ the DSA platform writes, ‘Replace the two-party system with a multi-party democracy. Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate’. Under the point ‘Real Democracy,’ they call for the Electoral College to be abolished as well.
The Senate is clearly defined in Article I, Section 3, Clause 1 of the US Constitution; thus, its removal would need a constitutional amendment. In order to achieve that, the DSA would need to get a two-thirds supermajority, 290 representatives, in the House of Representatives, and a two-thirds supermajority, 67 Senators, in the Senate as well. Even if they were to get somehow nearly all Senators to vote for the abolishment of their own institution, three-quarters of state legislatures, 38 out of 50, would also need to vote to ratify the amendment to change the Constitution.
The last amendment to be successfully ratified was the 27th Amendment—which requires that congressional pay raises take effect only after a new Congress is elected—in 1992.
However, the DSA activists are likely plotting a not-so-sneaky workaround in their far-fetched plans: in their platform, they also propose the replacement of ‘the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress’.
A ‘subordinate’ Supreme Court with progressive judges could simply apply as ‘creative’ interpretations of the constitutional text as they like, and thus implement sweeping changes to the 239-year-old political system without the proper amendment process.
Democratic Socialists of America Promises Free ‘Comfortable Housing’ as a Human Right
As we pointed out earlier, most of the articles covering the DSA platform focus on their proposed radical changes to the US political system. However, based on the order of the agenda points on their platform, that is not what the Democratic Socialists themselves want front and centre from their initiatives.
Instead, it is their proposed generous social programmes—which they understandably think will have wider appeal.
Thus, they pitch to the American people that under their governance, they would not even have to worry about bills.
‘You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities,’ they write.
The DSA goes on to rely heavily on Marxist rhetoric to convince the reader to get on their side, writing about the need for a ‘classless society’; as well as a call for our ‘class’ to organize.
The most prominent members of the Democratic Socialists of America group include Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City, and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib of Michigan—evidently, all from the Democratic Party.
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