The Democratic Socialists of America are about to drop a platform update that would abolish the U.S. Senate, eliminate the independently elected presidency, and replace the Supreme Court with a judiciary answerable to Congress. It is, to put it mildly, a lot. And given that DSA-backed candidates have now knocked out four sitting members of Congress in recent months, maybe stop laughing.
What They're Actually Proposing
According to Fox News, which cited a source familiar with the DSA's planning, the organization is set to roll out the platform update next week. The headline items: get rid of the Senate entirely, and replace both the president and the Supreme Court with an executive branch and a judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. One branch to rule them all, basically.
The proposal would also include amnesty for all immigrants and the defunding of what the DSA calls the Department of War, which is the Pentagon, if you're keeping track. This gets layered on top of their existing platform, which already calls for an immediate end to all deportations, free migration across borders without restrictive immigration controls, and full voting rights extended to both people with criminal convictions and noncitizens.
Look, you can agree or disagree with any individual item on that list. But the sheer scope of it, abolishing one entire chamber of Congress, subordinating the executive and judicial branches to a single legislature, doing away with the constitutional architecture that has governed the country for two and a half centuries, is not a policy agenda. It is a regime change proposal written in a Brooklyn co-working space.
How We Got Here: The DSA's Winning Streak
Here's the thing about dismissing the DSA as fringe: they have been winning. Fox News reports that four DSA-endorsed candidates have defeated sitting Democratic members of Congress in recent months. Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old from Colorado, knocked out a long-serving incumbent. Darializa Avila-Chevalier and Adam Hamawy flipped seats in New York. Donavan McKinney won in Michigan. These are not protest candidates who came close. They won.
The momentum traces back to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who went from state assemblyman to the national conversation almost overnight after defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo in the 2025 Democratic primary. That was a stunning result. Cuomo, for all his baggage, was a machine politician with decades of institutional support. Mamdani, an immigrant from Uganda and a card-carrying DSA member, beat him anyway.
After its recent primary sweep, the DSA declared that "only socialism can solve decades of capitalist mismanagement in the US" and promised its newly elected leaders would fight for "the working class, not for crumbs." Whether or not you buy the diagnosis, the patient is clearly listening. The DSA's membership and electoral relevance have grown in lockstep, and their enemies within the Democratic Party are, quite literally, losing their jobs.
The Existing Platform Is Already Ambitious Enough
Before you even get to the constitutional demolition derby, the DSA's current platform is already a five-alarm fire for establishment Democrats and a dream list for the left. Fox News notes it includes Medicare for All, universal rent control, cancellation of all student loan debt, a 32-hour work week with no reduction in pay or benefits, elimination of cash bail, and the abolition of ICE.
For context, abolishing ICE was considered a radioactive fringe position as recently as 2018. Now it sits somewhere in the middle of the DSA's policy stack, not even in the headline slot. That's how fast the Overton window has shifted inside this particular movement.
The DSA's 2025-2026 program also calls for a "new democratic constitution" built around proportional representation in a "single federal legislature." That's the unicameral Congress to replace the current bicameral setup. The Senate, which gives Wyoming the same two senators as California, is a longstanding target of reformers across the political spectrum. But "reform the Senate" and "eliminate the Senate and have Congress pick the president" are sentences that start in the same zip code and end on different planets.
What the Democratic Party Does With This Is Anyone's Guess
The DSA describes itself as a "working-class alternative to the Democratic Party," which is a polite way of saying they view the Democratic Party as a vehicle they are currently hot-wiring. The endorsed candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, run as Democrats. They caucus with Democrats. But the DSA's vision of governance has essentially nothing in common with the party's centrist wing, or even most of its progressive wing.
This creates a genuinely interesting problem for Democratic leadership. The party's base keeps sending DSA-aligned candidates to Congress. The DSA then publishes platforms calling for the abolition of the institutional structures that Democratic senators and presidents occupy. At some point, those two facts are going to collide in a very loud way.
Fox News reached out to the DSA for comment and, per the article, received none. That tracks. When your platform document makes a sufficient statement on its own, why add a quote?
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about two things at once, because that's what adults do. The DSA's electoral wins are real, and the economic frustrations driving them are real. Four sitting members of Congress lost their primaries to DSA-backed candidates. Zohran Mamdani is the mayor of the largest city in the United States. You do not explain this away by calling everyone involved a communist and waiting for the moment to pass. The moment is not passing.
And yet. Abolishing the Senate and having Congress appoint the president and the Supreme Court is not a policy platform. It is a thought experiment from a political theory seminar that someone accidentally stapled to a campaign flyer. The entire point of the American constitutional system, whatever its many, many flaws, is that power is distributed precisely so that no single faction can capture the whole thing at once. The DSA's proposal would concentrate that power in a single legislature that the DSA intends to control. History has a name for that arrangement, and it is not "democratic socialism."
The Fox News coverage here is predictably hysterical in framing, with Laura Ingraham warning of forces that want to "dismantle America" as though abolishing the filibuster is equivalent to storming the Bastille. But strip out the theatrics and the underlying facts remain genuinely newsworthy: a growing political organization with a real electoral record is about to publish a proposal to tear up the constitutional order. That deserves scrutiny from everyone, not just the people who already hate it.
