Introduction
On Sunday, July 26, Democratic Socialists of America national co-chair Megan Romer sat for a rapid true-or-false round with Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream and affirmed, one after another, the most structurally ambitious planks in her organization’s new national program: abolishing the U.S. Senate, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, phasing out national borders and prisons, defunding the Pentagon, and moving most large corporations into public ownership.
The clip circulated within hours. Republican National Committee researchers posted it. Conservative outlets treated the segment as a confession. Democratic strategists treated it as a headache heading into the November midterms.
Left mostly unexamined in that cycle is a more concrete question, and the one this analysis takes up: mechanically, what would it take to enact any of this — and what would the American system look like on the other side?
In simple terms: the interview told us what the DSA wants. It did not tell us what standing between the platform and reality actually consists of. That is a question with specific, countable answers.
Background
The Democratic Socialists of America launched its 2026–27 program, titled “Workers Deserve More,” on July 14. According to the authors’ note published alongside it, the document was drafted between April and June 2026 by a committee of members elected through a process established at DSA’s 2025 National Convention, then amended, finalized and approved by the organization’s National Political Committee.
The timing matters. DSA announced on July 4, 2026 that it had passed 120,000 dues-paying members — up from roughly 50,700 in October 2024, the month Zohran Mamdani launched his New York City mayoral campaign. The organization says the figure makes it the largest socialist organization in U.S. history, surpassing the Socialist Party of America’s 1912 peak of roughly 113,000 and the Communist Party USA’s 1947 high of about 75,000.
That growth has translated into electoral results. DSA-endorsed candidates unseated establishment Democrats in several 2026 primaries, and the organization’s best-known elected member, Mayor Mamdani, governs the country’s largest city. Romer told Bream that Democratic officials have discouraged DSA candidates from running on third-party lines; the organization runs its candidates in Democratic primaries.
DSA’s national conference, the Democratic Socialists Summit, is scheduled for Chicago, July 31 to August 2.
What the Program Actually Says
The viral summary of the interview compresses the platform in places. The program’s own text, published at program.dsausa.org, is more specific — and in two instances materially different from how it has been characterized.
On the Senate and Congress. Under the heading “A Democratic Congress,” the program calls to replace the two-party system with multi-party democracy, expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked-choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate. This is stated flatly, without qualification. DSA co-chairman Ashik Siddiqu has defended the plank publicly, calling the chamber undemocratic and the proposal not extreme.
On the presidency and the Supreme Court. Under “A Real Democracy,” the program calls to abolish the Electoral College and to replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress. The distinction between “abolish” and “replace with a body subordinate to the legislature” is not cosmetic. The program does not propose eliminating executive or judicial functions; it proposes eliminating their independence.
On immigration. Under “Abolish ICE,” the program calls to end ICE detention and deportations, legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.
On prisons and police. Under “End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity,” the program calls to demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services — framed explicitly as steps toward fully abolishing the police and prison system. It also calls to end qualified immunity and to treat addiction and mental illness as health issues rather than crimes. Abolition here is stated as a direction of travel, not an immediate demand.
On defense. Under “End the U.S. War Machine,” the program calls to defund the Department of War — the secondary designation adopted for the Department of Defense under Executive Order 14347 in September 2025 — end all foreign wars, close overseas military bases, and support International Criminal Court prosecution of U.S. war criminals.
On the economy. Under “Economic Democracy,” the program calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, alongside aggressive wealth taxation.
The authors are candid about the register in which these demands operate. The program’s own framing concedes that some demands might be won under the current system, but that “complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up.”
The Hypothetical: Running It Forward
Assume, for analysis, a political environment in which the DSA program has majority support and a governing coalition committed to enacting it. What happens next divides sharply into two categories: things that require amending the Constitution, and things that do not.
Stage One: The Amendments
Abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Electoral College, and subordinating the executive and judiciary to Congress all require constitutional amendment. Article V provides two paths. The conventional one requires a two-thirds vote in both chambers of Congress followed by ratification by three-fourths of the states — 38 of 50.
The arithmetic is unforgiving at every step.
The Senate would have to abolish itself by supermajority. Sixty-seven senators would need to vote to eliminate their own chamber and their own offices. There is no parliamentary workaround; the Senate cannot be bypassed in the congressional stage of Article V.
Article V contains an entrenchment clause. The article closes by providing that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate. This is the only substantive provision of the Constitution still shielded from ordinary amendment. Constitutional scholars have long debated whether it can be circumvented — the leading theory holds that Article V would first have to be amended to remove the clause, then the Senate abolished in a second amendment. The debate has never left the seminar room, because no amendment has ever come close. On the plain text, abolishing the Senate arguably requires the consent of all fifty states.
Ratification runs through the states least likely to agree. Thirty-eight states must ratify. The twenty-six smallest states — the ones whose Senate representation is most disproportionate to their population — would each be voting to surrender the leverage that abolition targets. Wyoming, with roughly 590,000 residents, would be voting to give up representation currently equal to California’s.
The historical base rate. In 237 years, more than 11,000 amendments have been proposed in Congress. Twenty-seven have been ratified. The most recent, the 27th, was ratified in 1992 after having been pending since 1789. The most recent amendment proposed and ratified in the ordinary course was the 26th, in 1971.
In simple terms: the constitutional planks are not a slow path. They are a closed path under current conditions, and the Senate plank may be closed under any conditions short of unanimity.
Stage Two: What Ordinary Legislation Could Reach
The other half of the program requires no amendment at all — only majorities and a president’s signature. This is where the platform stops being theoretical.
ICE is a statutory agency. It was created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. What Congress created, Congress can dissolve, reorganize, or defund by ordinary legislation. Its enforcement functions would not disappear — immigration law would remain on the books, and its administration would have to be reassigned or repealed — but the agency itself has no constitutional protection.
Defense funding is annual and discretionary. Congress appropriated $839.2 billion for Department of Defense discretionary activities in fiscal 2026 through the Consolidated Appropriations Act, an amount that ran $8.4 billion above the department’s own request. Total national defense resources for the year, including reconciliation authority, approach $1.04 trillion, or roughly 3.4 percent of GDP. Appropriations lapse annually. A majority that declined to renew them would not need to abolish anything.
Amnesty has precedent and scale. Legalization requires legislation, not amendment. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 legalized roughly 2.7 million people. The population contemplated by the DSA plank is an order of magnitude larger and genuinely contested: Department of Homeland Security methodology has produced estimates near 11 million; the Pew Research Center estimated a record 14 million as of 2023; the Migration Policy Institute estimated 13.7 million for mid-2023. Estimates from advocacy organizations on both sides run higher and lower. Any of those figures would make it the largest legalization in American history by a wide margin.
Prisons are overwhelmingly a state matter. Federal legislation reaches the federal prison population. The great majority of the roughly 1.9 million people confined in the United Statesare held in state prisons and county jails, governed by fifty legislatures. A federal majority could not abolish them.
Stage Three: The System That Would Result
Set aside feasibility and assume the constitutional planks were somehow enacted. The resulting structure is worth describing precisely, because it is the part of the debate most often skipped.
A unicameral national legislature elected by proportional representation, with an executive and judiciary chosen by and answerable to that legislature, is not an unprecedented design. It approximates a parliamentary system with weak judicial review — closer to New Zealand or, historically, the United Kingdom before its 2009 Supreme Court, than to anything the American framers built. Nebraska has operated a unicameral legislature since 1937 without incident. Proportional representation is the global norm among established democracies, not an exotic outlier.
What is genuinely distinct is the combination. The American system distributes veto points deliberately: bicameralism, an independently elected executive, and judicial review each allow a minority to block a majority. The DSA program removes all three. Its authors regard that as the point — Romer described the Senate to Bream as an anachronistic institution built to limit popular say, and the program’s framing treats counter-majoritarian structures as obstacles to working-class governance.
The analytically neutral observation is that veto points are indifferent to ideology. A legislature that faces no upper chamber, no independent executive, and no judiciary empowered to strike down its acts is unconstrained regardless of which coalition holds the majority. Whatever governing party emerged from the first election under such a system would inherit powers no American majority has ever held. Supporters of the program would need to be comfortable with those powers in their opponents’ hands; the program does not address that scenario.
How Many Democratic Socialists Are on the November Ballot?
No final number exists yet, and any figure published this week is a snapshot rather than a count. Primaries run into September, and DSA’s national organization and local chapters issue endorsements on rolling schedules. What follows is the state of the field as of late July.
House of Representatives
The DSA has backed 29 House candidates this cycle, according to the Washington Examiner’s endorsement tracker, last updated July 24. Of those, 11 have already been defeated in primaries, seven have won and advanced to the November general election, and 11 are awaiting primaries still to be held.
If the remaining eleven split evenly, the organization would carry somewhere near a dozen House nominees into November — against 435 seats.
Among those already on the general-election ballot:
- Melat Kiros (Colorado’s 1st) — a 29-year-old former lawyer who unseated 15-term Rep. Diana DeGette by nearly 14 points in a heavily Democratic Denver district, running on Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and ending aid to Israel, with Sen. Bernie Sanders’s endorsement.
- Darializa Avila Chevalier (New York’s 13th) — defeated Rep. Adriano Espaillat, chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, by four points in the Manhattan and Bronx-based seat. Endorsed by Mayor Mamdani.
- Chris Rabb (Pennsylvania) — a state representative who emerged from a crowded Philadelphia primary to succeed retiring Rep. Dwight Evans in what is rated the most Democratic-leaning district in the country.
- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (New York’s 14th) — a DSA member since before her 2018 election, she won her June 23 primary with 87 percent of the vote and chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Primaries still to come include Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and former Rep. Cori Bush’s rematch against Rep. Wesley Bell in Missouri, both on August 4; Emily Berge in Wisconsin’s 3rd on August 11; and Oliver Larkin’s challenge to Rep. Jared Moskowitz in Florida on August 18.
Senate
Zero, as of this writing. The DSA had not endorsed a Senate candidate as of the tracker’s July 24 update. It backed former state Sen. Troy Jackson’s Maine gubernatorial bid, in which he finished third; Jackson subsequently became the presumptive Democratic nominee against Sen. Susan Collins at a July 25 convention after Graham Platner’s campaign collapsed. The DSA has not weighed in on that Senate race.
Governor
One serious contender. Wisconsin state Rep. Francesca Hong leads polling for an open gubernatorial seat, with her primary still ahead. Hong endorsed calls to defund and abolish police following the 2020 protests and has largely stood by those remarks.
Mayoral
D.C. Councilwoman Janeese Lewis George won the Democratic primary to succeed retiring Mayor Muriel Bowser, defeating former Councilman Kenyan McDuffie, who ran a centrist campaign. In a heavily Democratic city, the primary is the consequential contest.
Nithya Raman, a self-described socialist, advanced to the Los Angeles general election against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass — but the DSA has not formally endorsed her, and the Los Angeles chapter censured her in 2024 for accepting a pro-Israel Democratic club’s endorsement.
Down-Ballot
This is where the numbers grow and the tracking thins. More than 30 DSA-backed candidates had won primaries across all levels of office by late June, with victories in Oregon, California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Utah, Maryland and New York. DSA-backed candidates have won close to half of their 2026 races so far. For comparison, the organization counted 14 wins against nine losses in the 2025 off-cycle elections.
DSA’s own publication, Democratic Left, counted nearly 90 endorsees nationally in March, including more than a dozen congressional candidates. The organization does not maintain a consolidated real-time list, and its published “Current Endorsements” page has been incomplete in prior cycles.
A Definitional Caveat
“DSA-backed” is not a single category, and the distinction matters for anyone citing a number.
National endorsement, local chapter endorsement, and DSA membership are three separate things, held by candidates in different combinations. Ocasio-Cortez is a member running without a national endorsement. Kiros holds both a national and a Denver chapter endorsement. Raman describes herself as a socialist, holds no endorsement, and has been censured by her local chapter. Counts that collapse these produce materially different totals.
In simple terms: the honest answer is somewhere in the low dozens for federal and statewide office and likely in the high double digits across all offices — with the final figure unsettled until the last primaries close in September. Anyone citing a hard number today is citing a moving one.
Impact
The near-term consequences of the platform are political rather than constitutional, and they are already unfolding.
DSA-endorsed candidates run on Democratic ballot lines. That structure means the national organization’s positions attach, fairly or not, to Democratic nominees who may not hold them. Mamdani, the movement’s most prominent officeholder, has said publicly that he does not personally endorse every plank adopted by the national organization — a distinction that is accurate and also difficult to communicate in a thirty-second clip.
Establishment Democrats have split on how much weight to give the moment. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut has argued that efforts to nationalize New York’s results will fail. Democratic strategist Jon Zepecki has called the reaction to the New York wins overblown, noting that DSA candidates also lost primaries. Others in the party treat the platform as an unforced liability with ninety-nine days remaining before the November 3 midterms.
For Republicans, the interview is straightforwardly useful. The RNC’s research operation amplified it within hours, and it slots into an existing campaign frame.
Analysis
The most common error in coverage of the DSA program — in both directions — is a category mistake about what the document is.
Read as a legislative agenda, it is not serious: its central planks require constitutional changes that are, by the plain text of Article V, either impossible or dependent on unanimous state consent. No coalition in American history has assembled the coalition required, and the entrenchment clause means the Senate plank may be uniquely immune even to overwhelming supermajorities.
Read as an organizing document, it does what it is designed to do. The authors’ note describes months of committee work under a convention mandate, and the program’s own preamble concedes that full realization requires a different society. The document’s function is to define a horizon and recruit toward it. Membership tripled over roughly eighteen months while this framing was in development.
The consequential question is therefore not whether the Senate will be abolished. It is what happens in the space between the program’s constitutional planks and its statutory ones. Defunding, agency dissolution, and legalization do not require amendments. They require majorities. That is a materially different threshold, and it is the part of the platform that a sufficiently large electoral coalition could actually reach.
That is also where the substantive argument belongs — on tradeoffs that can be evaluated: what replaces ICE’s enforcement functions, what a defense drawdown of a given size does to force posture and to the roughly 2.1 million people in the armed services and defense civilian workforce, what legalization at eleven-to-fourteen-million scale does to labor markets and to future migration incentives. Those questions have empirical answers and genuine disagreement among serious people. The constitutional planks, by contrast, are settled by arithmetic.
Conclusion
Megan Romer’s Fox News appearance was notable less for its content than for its directness. She confirmed what the DSA had already published in writing two weeks earlier, and declined the usual opportunity to soften it. The program says what it says.
What it would take to enact is a separate matter, and one the interview format could not accommodate. Roughly half the platform is beyond the reach of any conceivable American majority, blocked by an Article V clause that has never been tested because nothing has ever gotten close. The other half is ordinary legislation, subject to ordinary politics, and closer to the mainstream of the Democratic coalition than the viral clip suggests.
Both halves will be on the ballot in November, whether or not the candidates carrying them chose to be.
Key Takeaways
- DSA co-chair Megan Romer affirmed the organization’s platform planks in a July 26 Fox News Sunday interview, including abolishing the Senate, ICE, borders and prisons and defunding the Pentagon.
- The program text calls to replace the presidency and Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress, not abolish them outright, and frames prison abolition as a direction rather than an immediate demand.
- Abolishing the Senate requires constitutional amendment. Article V’s entrenchment clause protects equal state suffrage in the Senate, arguably requiring unanimous state consent.
- Twenty-seven amendments have been ratified in 237 years; the last one adopted in the ordinary course was in 1971.
- ICE dissolution, defense defunding and legalization require no amendment — only legislation.
- DSA passed 120,000 members on July 4, 2026, up from roughly 50,700 in October 2024.
- The DSA has backed 29 House candidates this cycle: 11 defeated in primaries, seven on the November ballot, 11 primaries still pending. No Senate endorsements; one competitive gubernatorial candidate in Wisconsin.
- More than 30 DSA-backed candidates across all levels had won primaries by late June; no final November ballot count is possible until primaries close in September.
- Congress appropriated $839.2 billion in FY2026 DoD discretionary funding; total national defense resources approach $1.04 trillion.
- Estimates of the unauthorized immigrant population range from about 11 million (DHS methodology) to 14 million (Pew, 2023).
Sources
1. Democratic Socialists of America, “Workers Deserve More” 2026–27 Program
2. Fox News, “DSA co-chair embraces abolishing Senate, ICE, borders as Democratic infighting escalates”, July 26, 2026
3. Washington Examiner, “DSA co-chair reaffirms calls to abolish the Senate, ICE, and borders in interview”, July 27, 2026
4. Daily Caller, “DSA Co-Chair Says Platform Includes Abolishing Prisons, Supreme Court And Presidency”, July 27, 2026
5. Denver Gazette, “DSA co-chair reaffirms calls to abolish the Senate, ICE, and borders”, July 27, 2026
6. Washington Examiner, “DSA co-chairman defends proposal to abolish Senate”
7. Washington Examiner, “DSA’s new platform seeks to ‘replace’ presidency and Supreme Court”
8. U.S. Constitution, Article V — Congress.gov
9. Constitution Annotated, “Unamendable Subjects” (Article V, equal suffrage)
10. Congressional Research Service, R48891, “FY2026 Department of Defense Appropriations: In Brief”
11. Congressional Research Service, R48860, “FY2026 Defense Budget: Funding for Selected Weapon Systems”
12. Senate Appropriations Committee, FY2026 Defense Appropriations bill summary
13. Pew Research Center, “U.S. Unauthorized Immigrant Population Reached a Record 14 Million in 2023”, August 21, 2025
14. Migration Policy Institute, “Changing Origins, Rising Numbers: Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States”
15. Prison Policy Initiative, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2026”
16. City & State New York, “DSA’s membership nearly doubled since start of Mamdani campaign”, January 27, 2026
17. Newsweek, “9 Hidden Players in the DSA’s Breakout Rise”, July 2026
18. Washington Examiner, “DSA endorsement tracker: Here are the socialists running for office across America”, updated July 24, 2026
19. Washington Examiner, “Over 30 socialists have won primaries this year”, June 25, 2026
20. Washington Examiner, “Wisconsin governor primary becomes Democratic Party proxy war”
21. Democratic Left (DSA), “DSA Launches New Program”, July 17, 2026
22. Democratic Left (DSA), “Chapters Prepare for a Busy Election Season in 2026”, March 2, 2026
23. DSA-LA, 2026 Primary Voter Guide
24. Democratic Socialists of America, 2026 Democratic Socialists Summit
25. National Review, “DSA Calls to Abolish the Senate, Presidency, and Supreme Court”
Pre-publication: comment request outstanding to DSA national communications, to Megan Romer, and to the Jackson campaign regarding the July 25 Maine convention outcome.