Democratic Socialists of America, a group that’s gaining momentum across the country, is pushing to scrap the U.S. Senate and replace it with a unicameral legislature. Senate Democrats aren’t on board.
“It’s in the Constitution, and it is a critical component of the United States government to pass legislation with the House,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told NOTUS. “In my view, that is not a serious recommendation.”
“I don’t even know what they mean by that. I don’t have any idea,” added a befuddled Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Even Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who’s long called himself a democratic socialist, isn’t on board with the proposal.
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“No,” Sanders told NOTUS. He declined to elaborate, saying he had a flight to catch.
The DSA’s new platform, unveiled earlier this month, calls for expanding the social safety net and making sweeping changes to the federal government. Those include abolishing the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Those institutions would be replaced with an “executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress,” as well as an expanded House of Representatives with multiple political parties instead of the current two-party system. Those ideas would require approving an amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a major hurdle in a polarized political environment.
“The Senate is a very undemocratic institution,” Ashik Siddique, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America, said in an interview on C-SPAN. “I talked a bit about democracy, a small ‘d’ democracy, and that’s really important to us. We want democratic representation of all people who live in this country.”
The DSA platform, titled “Workers Deserve More,” has drawn attacks and ridicule from top Republicans who are seeking to tie some of its controversial ideas, such as abolishing the police, to the Democratic Party and its candidates ahead of November’s midterm elections. Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist and front-runner in the Wisconsin governor’s Democratic primary race, for example, is facing questions about the platform and her past comments calling to abolish the police.
“I do not support the full platform of the national DSA, and I am not endorsed by DSA national. What democratic socialism is, is a form of government that puts working-class people first,” Hong said in a debate last week, backing away from a 2020 social media post in which she called to abolish the police.
Some Democrats believe their party isn’t doing enough to marginalize the democratic socialist movement, which recently claimed victories in local and congressional races in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado and Washington, D.C. According to a recent CNN poll, about a third of Democrats now identify as democratic socialists.
“These people sat in a room and said, ‘How much crazy shit can we cram into a platform?’ Like, ‘Yeah, abolish the Senate? Sure, why not. Hey, abolish the presidency? Yeah, sure, why not?’ That’s crazy shit,” Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who has broken with Democrats on several key issues, told NOTUS. “I’m unique, I’m the only Democrat that will call it out.”
But other Democrats downplayed the rise of DSA, arguing that most people who consider themselves to be far-left progressives ascribe to more popular ideas like taxing the rich and providing universal health care.
“I know people in Richmond who align with DSA who don’t want to abolish the Senate,” said Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine. “They don’t want to abolish the presidency. If you ask them, ‘Why are you DSA?’ they will say, ‘I’m a Democrat, but I like DSA because I don’t like the concentration of wealth.’”
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker said his constituents are more concerned about their economic situation and having health care rather than “proposing things that would require a constitutional amendment,” which he called “farcical at this point.”
Still, Booker, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, said he did support other structural reforms such as granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, as well as changing equal state apportionment, which gives every state two senators, no matter its population.
“The Senate does have things that our founders never imagined, like the fact that North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana have 10 senators and they have less population than Los Angeles County, and that’s really problematic,” Booker said. “But there are things that really focus on the real issues of people that we can get done here, that I think we should be organizing around.”
Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, meanwhile, argued that voter frustration with how the Senate operates could be addressed if its members stood up for the system of checks and balances as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
“I think that we need to do something about a supine Senate. There’s a lot of madness happening right now in the White House that this body could do something to address if there was any courage,” Warnock said, before adding, “If my Republican colleagues had any moral courage.”
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