Abolish Congress? DSA’s Wild Power Play

Legislative chamber filled with attendees during a formal address — Photo: Rob Crandall / Shutterstock

The Democratic Socialists of America’s new “Workers Deserve More” program is not a tweak to U.S. politics but an explicit blueprint for replacing core constitutional institutions with a centralized, working‑class–controlled legislature.

Key Points

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has adopted a national program that calls for abolishing the U.S. Senate, the Electoral College, the presidency as currently constituted, and the independent Supreme Court.
The program proposes a new democratic constitution built around a single, expanded House of Representatives elected by proportional representation, with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
These institutional changes sit alongside a sweeping socialist agenda: public ownership of major industries, a 32‑hour workweek, universal rent control, Medicare for All, and a dramatically downsized U.S. military.
The DSA’s structural demands echo a long tradition of radical movements that seek not to amend the U.S. Constitution but to replace it outright—an approach that has never yet succeeded in American history.

What the DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” Program Actually Proposes

The starting point is the primary source: DSA’s own program site, which describes “Workers Deserve More” as its national program and political vision. In the section on “Working Class Democracy,” the document calls for far‑reaching institutional redesign. It explicitly demands the abolition of the Electoral College and states: “Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” and “abolish the Senate.” This is not media paraphrase; it is the organization’s own language, presented as part of its core national platform rather than as a fringe resolution.

The program’s institutional blueprint centers on a single, significantly enlarged House of Representatives elected by proportional representation and ranked‑choice voting. DSA ties this to a broader commitment to draft “a new democratic constitution” designed to put workers “in charge of the government,” with money driven out of politics and the two‑party system replaced by a multi‑party democracy. In other words, the Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court are not to be incrementally reformed; they are to be replaced within an entirely new constitutional order.

Abolishing the Senate, Presidency, and Supreme Court: Structure and Rationale

The best way to understand the DSA plan is to see it as a structural answer to a political diagnosis. DSA argues that the current U.S. system is fundamentally skewed toward wealthy elites and minority rule; on that reading, reforms at the margins cannot secure “working‑class democracy.” The Senate, with its equal representation of states regardless of population and its entrenched supermajority rules, is treated as the chief institutional villain. The platform’s solution is categorical: “abolish the Senate” and expand the House under proportional representation so that parties’ legislative strength mirrors their voter support.

The presidency, in DSA’s account, concentrates too much power in a single executive elected through an Electoral College system they view as anti‑democratic. The program thus couples abolition of the Electoral College with a reimagined executive branch: rather than a separately elected president, an executive selected by and subordinate to the legislature. The same logic applies to the Supreme Court. Rather than an independent judicial branch with life‑tenured justices, the DSA program envisions a judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. The central state, in this model, is a sovereign, worker‑controlled legislature whose authority radiates downward.

From Platform Drafts to National Program: How This Became DSA’s Public Stance

DSA has gestured at institutional overhaul for years, but “Workers Deserve More” crystallizes and escalates those ambitions. A draft platform circulated for DSA’s 2021 convention already proposed constitutional amendments to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College. That earlier document imagined deepening democracy largely through aggressive amendment of the existing constitutional framework rather than its replacement. By the mid‑2020s, however, DSA leadership moved toward a more comprehensive program.

According to both DSA’s own rollout materials and independent reporting, “Workers Deserve More” was adopted by the organization’s National Political Committee (NPC) as its first unified platform, replacing prior patchwork resolutions and the 2021 platform as DSA’s “sole public program.” The City Journal account, drawing on internal deliberations, notes that the “real democracy” amendment—containing the language about replacing the president and Supreme Court with Congress‑subordinate bodies—passed the NPC by a razor‑thin margin, not by overwhelming consensus. That underscores an internal reality: this is now DSA’s official program, but the most radical structural plank was contentious even within its leadership.

Beyond Institutions: The Economic and Social Agenda Under the New Constitution

The constitutional proposals are meant to support a broader transformation of the political economy. The 2025–2026 program PDF lays out three major pillars: a “thriving working class,” “an economy for the working class,” and “working class democracy.” On the policy level, that translates into Medicare for All with no premiums, co‑pays, or deductibles; universal housing guarantees and rent control; a 32‑hour workweek without loss of pay; major public investment in a green transition; and extensive public ownership of essential industries and infrastructure.

Foreign policy is reoriented around demilitarization and anti‑imperialism. The program calls for steep cuts to the U.S. military budget, closure of overseas bases, and the end of most economic sanctions. It demands a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to U.S. aid to Israel, and recognizes a Palestinian “right to resist” and “right of return,” with Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state. Domestically, DSA proposes to extend full voting rights to people with criminal convictions and to non‑citizens resident in the United States, “demilitarize” the border, and grant amnesty and access to social services for all immigrants regardless of status. The institutional redesign is thus the keystone of a comprehensive attempt to end capitalism and build what DSA describes as a democratic socialist republic.

Where This Fits in the Broader History of Radical Constitutional Critique

The DSA program belongs to a longstanding but minority American tradition that sees the Constitution not as a flawed but redeemable document, but as a structural engine of injustice that must be replaced. In the nineteenth century, the Garrisonian abolitionists famously burned copies of the Constitution and denounced it as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” arguing that any genuine liberation required dispensing with the charter itself. Other antislavery thinkers, like Frederick Douglass and Lysander Spooner, took the opposite view—that the Constitution was fundamentally antislavery and could be used, through political struggle, to abolish slavery within the existing framework.

The outcome of that conflict is instructive. Slavery was ended not by scrapping the Constitution but through the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified after Senate passage and state approval. Subsequent expansions of civil and political rights for Black Americans and other marginalized groups also occurred via amendment, legislation, and litigation inside the existing separation‑of‑powers design. Every successful major structural reform—from direct election of Senators to presidential term limits—has followed the amendment path, not wholesale replacement. The DSA’s position, therefore, is not simply ambitious; it sits outside the only historically successful route for transforming core federal institutions.

Feasibility and Strategic Role: Visionary Blueprint or Practical Road Map?

Measured against current constitutional law, the odds of implementing the DSA program in anything like its stated form are effectively nil in the short to medium term. The Constitution provides detailed procedures for amendment, but none for its own replacement by a wholly new charter through ordinary political organizing. Even proposals far less sweeping than abolishing the Senate—such as term limits or balanced budget requirements—have struggled to clear the dual hurdles of congressional supermajorities and state ratification. Eliminating the Senate, presidency, and independent Supreme Court would require either an unprecedented wave of constitutional amendments or a revolutionary break in legal continuity.

Within DSA itself, leaders describe “Workers Deserve More” as both a vision and an “action organizing document,” a way to orient campaigns and recruitment around a coherent socialist horizon rather than a grab‑bag of issue demands. In that sense, the platform functions as much as a movement‑building manifesto as a legislative agenda. By laying out maximalist institutional goals, the organization stakes a clear identity in a crowded left‑of‑center landscape, signaling that it is not merely a pressure group on the Democratic Party but a vehicle for systemic transformation.

Why This Program Matters Even If It Never Becomes Law

For many readers, the likelihood that the Senate will be abolished or that the Supreme Court will be subordinated to Congress may seem remote enough to ignore. That would be a mistake. Ambitious programs, even when unrealized, shape political imagination and debate. The DSA platform gives language and structure to frustrations a growing number of Americans feel about minority rule in the Senate, perceived judicial overreach, and the concentration of power in the presidency. It offers a coherent, if radical, answer to the question: what would it look like to take those critiques to their logical conclusion?

At the same time, the platform forces a clarifying choice for elected officials aligned with or endorsed by DSA. Officeholders who benefit from DSA’s electoral work will increasingly be asked whether they support not just its popular economic planks, such as Medicare for All or a higher minimum wage, but also its institutional agenda: abolishing the Senate, remaking the presidency, and ending judicial independence. How they answer those questions will determine whether “Workers Deserve More” remains primarily a movement document or begins to migrate into the realm of mainstream policy debate.