The DSA’s Plan to End Separation of Powers

I hear a lot about the platform of the Democratic Socialists of America. One thing that keeps coming up from the right is that they want to abolish the U.S. Senate and replace the independent presidency and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary that are subordinate to Congress. A lot of people on the right look at that and call it communism.

Some on the right call this communism because it would concentrate legislative, executive, and judicial power in a single body. Once the legislature chooses and controls both the people who enforce the laws and the people who interpret them, the remaining restraints are political rather than structural. That institutional design—combined with the DSA’s broader goal of public ownership of major industries—looks, to critics, less like a reformed republic and more like the concentrated authority seen in socialist systems that discarded independent checks in the name of the people’s will.

I’ve struggled with the reasoning behind it. I asked my AI assistant to walk me through their logic, and one line stuck with me:

What the DSA is proposing is a pure majoritarian legislature that selects and controls the people who enforce and interpret the laws. Once you accept that structure, the remaining ‘checks’ become internal party discipline or temporary public opinion rather than institutional barriers. That’s why critics reach for the communism label: not because every DSA member is quoting Lenin, but because the institutional architecture they want looks a lot more like a people’s assembly with an administrative arm than a system of divided government.

The more I sit with that, the clearer it becomes. This isn’t just about reforming the Senate or making the system more “democratic.” It’s designed to eliminate the whole idea of separation of powers and checks and balances in favor of what they call true majority rule.

That phrase is doing a lot of work. For the DSA, “true majority rule” means a single legislature elected by proportional representation that can pass laws, choose the people who enforce them, and choose the people who interpret them—all without an independent executive or court able to block the popular will. In their view, the Senate (which gives equal power to small states), the Electoral College, and an independent Supreme Court are not safeguards. They are deliberate obstacles that let a minority of the population, or the “ruling class,” override what a numerical majority wants. Remove those obstacles and the working class can finally govern without institutional interference.

The American system was built on a different idea: that pure majority rule, left unchecked, can become its own form of tyranny. That’s why the Founders created a republic with multiple filters—representation by states as well as by population, an independent executive, and a judiciary that answers to the Constitution rather than the latest legislative majority. They believed ambition should counteract ambition, and that no single body should hold all three kinds of power.

So the DSA proposal is not a small adjustment. It is a conscious choice to trade those structural brakes for a more direct form of majority control. Whether that produces better government or simply concentrates power in whoever controls the legislature at any given moment is the real debate.

That’s interesting when you consider how many on the left feel about Trump. Right now we have mechanisms that can at least slow a president down, even if they can’t always stop him outright. Those mechanisms include two houses of Congress and a Supreme Court. They’re especially potent when the opposition controls one or both chambers of Congress. If Democrats somehow take control of Congress in this year’s midterms, those same institutional brakes would be available to restrain a president they dislike. The DSA proposal would remove that architecture entirely in the name of true majority rule.

Sources

• The Democratic Socialists of America’s current program, Workers Deserve More, explicitly calls for abolishing the Senate and replacing the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress: program.dsausa.org.
• A 2014 article published on the DSA’s own site makes the case for abolishing the Senate as an undemocratic institution: “Want Democracy in the United States? Abolish the Senate!” (Democratic Socialists of America).
• City Journal reported on the platform’s adoption and quoted DSA leaders discussing the abolition of the Senate and subordination of the other branches: “The Democratic Socialists of America Just Adopted a Radical New Platform” by Stu Smith.
• DSA co-chair Ashik Siddique stated on C-SPAN that abolishing the Senate is part of the organization’s platform and that it historically served “very wealthy people”: The Post Millennial report.
• National Review noted the DSA’s official position against the Senate and the constitutional barriers to abolishing it: “The DSA vs. the Senate”.
• Fox News covered the platform’s call to eliminate the Senate and make the executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress: “Socialists launch radical platform to abolish the US Senate”.