Political parties tend to harshly reject the idea that they are a threat to the constitutional order, but the Democratic Socialists of America are making it part of their brand.
The DSA has released a new program that, besides contemplating the advent of a classless society, calls for abolishing the Senate, the presidency and the Supreme Court. This is literally a revolutionary program to topple the American system as we have known it since 1789.
The proposal to kill off the world’s greatest deliberative body has gotten the most attention. New York City’s DSA co-chair, Gustavo Gordillo, went on Fox News to explain that the Senate is “undemocratic,” and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that she opposes the filibuster and elements of the Senate that “were founded on Jim Crow.”
Contrary to Gordillo, the Senate is democratic; no one wins a Senate seat without getting more votes than his or her opponent. Yet, part of its role is to serve as a check on popular passions. At the institution’s inception, state legislatures appointed senators. Those days are gone — the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, requires direct election — but six-year staggered terms elections give the Senate more insulation from the transient currents of sentiment than the House.
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, very much including Senate Democrats arrayed against President Donald Trump today.
The Senate has another function, which is giving small states equal representation with large states. This is the source of the charge that it is 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. For proportional representation, there’s the House; California has 52 members of Congress, whereas Wyoming has one.
All this said, regardless of the merits, the Constitution deems the provision of equal senators for the states unamendable: “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” This suggests that the dissolution of the constitutional system could not be achieved by constitutional means, because the Founders didn’t supply a readily available self-destruct button for their brilliant handiwork.
Not that the DSA cares. What it seeks 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 weak central government, while the DSA wants an overweening Washington, shorn of the inherent checks on the popular will that come with a multi-layered federal system.
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 to the target list, with a nod to the DSA, the U.S. constitutional order. The socialists have met the enemy — and it is our own longstanding, successful governing institutions.
Rich Lowry is on X
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