Political organizations often vehemently deny being a menace to the constitutional framework, yet the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) seem to embrace this notion as a core element of their identity.
Recently, the DSA unveiled an ambitious agenda envisioning the dismantling of long-standing institutions in the United States. Their program not only imagines a classless society but also boldly proposes eliminating the US Senate, presidency, and Supreme Court.
This agenda represents a true revolutionary shift, aiming to reshape an American political system that has stood firm since the birth of the nation in 1789.
Such radical proposals echo the dramatic actions one might anticipate from insurgents taking to the streets of Washington, DC, with intentions to overthrow the established government.
Next to these audacious ideas, suggestions like abolishing the filibuster seem minor, while even the contentious topic of court-packing starts to appear relatively conservative.
The proposal to kill off the world’s greatest deliberative body has gotten the most attention.
The DSA’s co-chair, Gustavo Gordillo, went on Fox News to explain that the Senate is “undemocratic,” while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has said that she opposes the filibuster and elements of the Senate that “were founded on Jim Crow.”
Contra Gordillo, the Senate is a democratic institution; no one wins a Senate seat without getting more votes than his or her opponent.
Yet, part of its role in our system is to serve as a check on popular passions.
At the institution’s inception, state legislatures appointed senators.
Those days are long gone (the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, requires direct election), but six-year terms and staggered elections give the Senate more insulation from the transient currents of public sentiment than the House of Representatives.
Then, there are the Senate rules that put an emphasis on consensus and delay.
AOC sounded confused when she cited Senate practices created under Jim Crow, the system of formalized racial discrimination that arose about 100 years after the creation of the Senate.
It’s true that the filibuster was used as a tool to attempt to block landmark civil-rights legislation, without ultimate success.
But the filibuster is an instrument of every minority party in the Senate trying to block the agenda of a president of the opposing party, very much including the Senate Democrats arrayed against President Donald Trump today.
The Senate has another function: giving small states equal representation with large states in Washington, DC.
This is the source of the charge that it’s undemocratic: Why should Wyoming, population roughly 600,000, have as many senators as California, population nearly 40 million?
This is meant, though, to keep large states from having overwhelming influence on the nation’s governance, and to give easy-to-ignore places a say in the nation’s affairs.
For proportional representation, there’s the House; California has 52 members of Congress, whereas Wyoming has only one.
All this said, regardless of the merits, the Constitution deems the provision of equal senators for the states un-amendable: “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”
This suggests that the dissolution of the constitutional system couldn’t be achieved by constitutional means, since the Founders didn’t supply a readily available self-destruct button for their brilliant handiwork.
Not that the DSA cares.
What they are seeking would, in some ways, be a return to the Articles of Confederation, under which we had a unicameral legislature and neither a presidency nor federal courts.
But this made for a very weak central government, and the DSA wants an overweening Washington shorn of the inherent checks on the popular will that come with a multi-layered federal system.
In short, it hopes for what Lord Hailsham, in his criticism of the British parliamentary system, famously called an “elective dictatorship.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech last week in which he inveighed against left-wing extremists who seek to destroy rather than build, targeting “the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement.”
He might have added, with a nod to the DSA, the US constitutional order. The socialists have met the enemy — and it is our own longstanding, highly successful governing institutions.
X: @RichLowry