When a major left-wing organization openly calls for abolishing the Senate, prisons, national borders, and even the presidency and Supreme Court “as we know them,” it is not merely floating ideas on criminal justice or immigration—it is challenging the basic architecture of American constitutional government.
Key Points
- In a Fox News interview, DSA national co-chair Megan Romer explicitly confirmed that the group’s platform includes abolishing the Senate and replacing the presidency and Supreme Court “as we now know them,” alongside other sweeping changes.
- The same on-air exchange confirmed goals to abolish ICE, defund the Pentagon, largely abolish prisons, and work toward border abolition with amnesty for people currently in the country illegally, framed as part of a “long-term” program.
- These positions are presented as core planks of DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” platform, which also envisions a unicameral legislature and expanded public ownership of large corporations.
- Most of the public record comes through adversarial media, but there is no evidence that DSA leadership has disputed the accuracy of Romer’s statements or the platform’s structural ambitions.
What the DSA Platform Actually Says It Wants
The starting point for understanding this controversy is not commentary but the DSA’s own presentation of its program. In late 2020s coverage of DSA’s “Workers Deserve More” platform, reporters and critics alike describe a document that goes well beyond standard social-democratic fare—higher minimum wages, labor rights, or public housing—to propose fundamental institutional overhaul. The platform is reported to call for eliminating the Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, drafting a new constitution, and moving toward a “democratic socialist republic.”
Those structural goals sit alongside more familiar economic and social measures: shortening the workweek to thirty-two hours, expanding public housing, strengthening unions, and increasing public ownership in strategic sectors. In other words, the agenda is not simply about changing policy within current rules; it is about changing the rules themselves. That distinction matters because abolishing a chamber of Congress or the presidency is not a matter of simple legislation; it would require rewriting the constitutional order.
The Megan Romer Interview: On-Record Confirmation
The most concrete evidence about DSA’s structural aims comes from Megan Romer’s now widely circulated interview with Shannon Bream on “Fox News Sunday.” The format was deliberately blunt: Bream displayed a list of platform planks and asked Romer to answer “true or false.” The exchange has been independently reproduced by multiple outlets and video clips, and the core passages are consistent across those accounts.
Asked “Abolish the Senate?” Romer replied, “True.” Bream followed immediately: “Replace the presidency and Supreme Court as we now know them?” Romer: “Yep.” The list continued: “Abolish ICE?”—“Absolutely.” “Abolish borders and give amnesty to anyone currently in the US illegally?”—“As a long-term plan, yep.” “Defund the Pentagon?”—“Absolutely.” “Abolish prisons, at least in large part?”—“Yeah, again, as part of a long-term program, yeah.”
Those answers were not presented as personal musings; Romer explicitly framed them as the DSA platform. Subsequent discussion in the same interview clarified that the group envisions abolishing the Senate and expanding Congress into a unicameral legislature, on the argument that the upper chamber is an “anachronistic” institution modeled on the British House of Lords that thwarts democratic representation. In short, the abolition language is connected to a particular institutional model, not simply gesture politics.
How DSA Justifies Prison, Border, and Defense “Abolition”
Romer’s long-form explanation, and later DSA-linked commentary, give a clearer sense of how the organization conceptualizes abolitionist demands. On prisons, Romer argued that most incarceration stems from “crimes of poverty,” that significant reductions in poverty would dramatically shrink prison populations, and that society can “collectively decide” how to separate a smaller residual group of dangerous offenders without reproducing the current prison system. She insisted the objective is “safety, not punishment,” situating DSA within a broader abolitionist framework that treats prisons as symptoms of economic and racial injustice rather than indispensable tools of public safety.
On borders, Romer rejected the caricature of immediate open borders. Instead, she described border abolition and universal amnesty as a “long-term plan” linked to ending U.S. policies that destabilize other countries and drive migration. In that framing, the border is less a neutral administrative line than an institution that manages inequalities created upstream by imperialism and economic exploitation. Abolishing borders, then, is the end state of a transformed global order rather than a discrete policy step.
The Pentagon and ICE are treated similarly: DSA’s platform calls for defunding the “War Department” and abolishing ICE as part of a shift from militarized security toward social investment. Whether or not one accepts that tradeoff, it is conceptually consistent with the group’s view that violence and coercion are primarily tools of an unjust status quo, not safeguards of a legitimate order.
Abolishing the Senate and the Constitutional Architecture
Of all the proposals, abolishing the Senate is the most immediately legible and the easiest to weaponize in political debate. It also illustrates how DSA ties structural reform to democratic theory. The Senate, Romer argued, over-represents sparsely populated states and functions as a brake on popular power. New York City DSA leaders have echoed this reasoning, calling the chamber “unrepresentative” and advocating strong reform, even when they stop short of outright abolition.
In practice, eliminating the Senate, replacing the presidency and Supreme Court, and drafting a new constitution would require extraordinary political alignment—supermajorities in Congress, ratification by three-fourths of the states, or some extra-constitutional constituent process. The available record does not contain a DSA legal roadmap for achieving that transformation; the emphasis is on end-state vision rather than procedural feasibility. That gap is important. It means the platform should be understood as an aspirational blueprint for a different kind of republic, not as a legislative to-do list that could be enacted in the next Congress.
Critics on the left and center have focused less on constitutional detail than on political fallout. Centrist Democrats and commentators warn that talk of abolishing entire branches of government is “wildly anti-American” and easily framed as an attempt to “destroy the current political system,” language that appears in both conservative commentary and some mainstream coverage. From that vantage point, the problem is not just feasibility but legitimacy: a platform that defines the existing constitutional order itself as the enemy.
DSA, the Democratic Party, and the Question of Association
The controversy gains its real political charge from DSA’s position inside, rather than outside, the Democratic electoral ecosystem. DSA candidates overwhelmingly run on Democratic ballot lines, often in deep-blue districts where primaries are effectively decisive. Party figures from Representative Henry Cuellar to outside analysts have argued that the organization is “using” the Democratic Party as a vehicle to advance an agenda that is “alien” to mainstream Democrats.
This overlap creates a branding problem. When a DSA co-chair says on national television that the platform seeks to abolish the Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court, conservative media and Republican officials can portray the remarks as representative of “the Democrats” writ large. At the same time, polling cited in Fox coverage suggests a significant share of Democratic voters view DSA favorably, which blunts incentives for elected Democrats to condemn the platform too aggressively. The result is visible discomfort: some Democratic officeholders dodge questions, others issue targeted rebukes around the edges, but there is no unified, formal boundary-setting document from party institutions in the material we have.
Romer herself leans into this tension. In other interviews, she has warned that “establishment Democrats should be worried about the voters,” arguing that discontent with centrist governance is driving support for democratic socialism. From the DSA perspective, friction with party leadership is evidence of effective pressure; from the leadership’s perspective, that same friction risks ceding the political center to Republicans in a closely divided country.
How Uncontested Are These Claims Inside DSA?
One limitation of the current evidence is that it relies heavily on Romer’s televised description and on media paraphrases of the “Workers Deserve More” platform. We do not have, in this record, the full convention resolutions or internal governance documents that would show precisely how these planks were debated, ratified, and prioritized. Nor do we have systematic sampling of statements from other national DSA officers that would either reinforce or soften the abolitionist language.
What we do have is notable silence on one point: there is no sign that DSA leadership has publicly contested Romer’s wording or claimed that Fox misrepresented the platform. That absence does not prove unanimous internal support, but it makes it hard to argue that the interview was a rogue mischaracterization. In addition, sympathetic coverage in left publications describes the same platform as a serious attempt to spell out what a democratic socialist transformation would entail, not as a throwaway media stunt. Taken together, the reasonable inference is that the abolition language reflects a real current within DSA’s official thinking.
Why This Debate Keeps Returning
In American political history, radical factional platforms tend to force two intertwined conversations: one about substance and one about party identity. The substantive question is whether prisons, borders, or bicameralism can be justified on democratic or ethical grounds. The identity question is whether a major party can accommodate an organized faction that regards core institutions as illegitimate.
The DSA platform sits squarely in that lineage. It argues that the existing constitutional framework entrenches class power, racial hierarchy, and imperial reach; therefore, a just society requires not only different policies but different institutions. Its critics respond that durable reform has historically come through working within those institutions—amending the Constitution, expanding civil rights, and building welfare-state programs—rather than razing the architecture itself.
Because DSA operates inside the Democratic ballot structure, the two conversations are impossible to separate. Every time a DSA leader speaks candidly about abolishing the Senate or prisons, Democratic officials must decide whether to engage the substance, denounce the platform, or change the subject. In a closely contested, polarized system, each choice carries risks: alienate part of the base, hand ammunition to opponents, or appear evasive about what the party stands for.
Sources:
mediaite.com, foxnews.com, newsbusters.org, youtube.com, facebook.com, issuesinsights.com, thehill.com, jacobin.com, suozziforcongress.com, theatlantic.com