When the Constitutional Safeguards Disappear
How Four Proposed DSA Changes to American Government
Could Threaten Individual Liberty
The most important question raised by the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) proposed changes to the American Constitution is not simply how we elect our leaders or organize our government. It is what happens to individual liberty when political power is concentrated in the hands of a single governing majority—and when that majority gains greater control over the institutions that are supposed to restrain it.
The American system rests on a fundamental principle: the majority has the right to govern, but it does not have the right to exercise unlimited power over the lives and liberties of those who disagree with it.
The Declaration of Independence identifies life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as unalienable rights. The Constitution gives practical effect to that principle by dividing governmental authority, limiting its reach, and establishing independent institutions to check its exercise.
The DSA’s 2026 national program proposes four fundamental changes to this constitutional arrangement:
Abolish the United States Senate.
Abolish the Electoral College.
Replace the independently elected President with an executive chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
Replace the independent Supreme Court with a judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
The DSA describes these changes as part of creating a new political system and drafting a new constitution.
These are not merely proposals to reorganize government. Taken together, they would fundamentally alter where political power resides, how it is restrained, and what protections remain for individuals who disagree with those in power.
The Four Changes: A Concentration of Political Power
The United States is a constitutional federal republic. Political authority is divided between the national government and the states. Within the national government, authority is divided among legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
These divisions are not incidental. They are safeguards against the concentration and abuse of political power.
Each of the DSA’s four proposals would weaken or eliminate one of these safeguards.
1. Abolishing the Senate: Removing Equal State Representation
The Senate gives every state equal representation, regardless of population. California and Wyoming each have two senators. This ensures that less populous states retain a meaningful voice in national legislation and cannot simply be outvoted on every issue by the most populous states.
Abolishing the Senate would eliminate this balance and leave a single legislative chamber representing the national population.
This is more than a change in congressional organization. It would remove an important protection for the states within the federal structure of the republic.
There is also a significant constitutional obstacle: Article V expressly provides that no state may be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate without its consent.
2. Abolishing the Electoral College: Removing the States from Presidential Selection
The Electoral College is often treated as merely an alternative way of counting votes in a presidential election. Its constitutional significance is much greater.
Under the present system, states participate in selecting the President through electoral votes. Each state’s electoral representation includes its two senators and its representation in the House. Presidential selection therefore recognizes the states as constituent members of the federal republic, rather than treating the country as one undifferentiated electorate.
Abolishing the Electoral College would replace this state-based constitutional mechanism with a national popular vote.
That change alone would not turn the United States into a pure democracy. We would still elect representatives and retain state governments. But it would remove an important federal feature of presidential selection. Combined with abolishing the Senate, it would further shift political authority away from the states and toward a national majority.
The consequence is a fundamental change in the relationship between the states and the national government. Federalism is not simply a matter of administrative convenience. It distributes political authority and gives citizens more than one level of government through which to exercise self-government.
3. Subordinating the Executive to Congress: Removing an Independent Check
Under the present Constitution, the President heads a separate branch of government and is independently elected through the Electoral College.
Congress makes the laws. The President heads the executive branch responsible for administering and enforcing them. Neither branch is subordinate to the other.
The DSA proposes replacing the President with an executive chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
This would fundamentally change the balance of power. The legislative majority would exercise greater control over the executive authority responsible for enforcing the laws it creates.
That matters because the executive branch exercises enormous power over individuals through federal agencies, regulations, investigations, and law enforcement.
An independent executive provides a separate center of constitutional authority. Subordinating that office to Congress would weaken one of the principal checks on legislative power.
4. Subordinating the Judiciary to Congress: Weakening the Protection of Individual Rights
This proposal has perhaps the most direct consequence for individual liberty.
An independent judiciary exists in part to protect individuals against government action, including action supported by a political majority. Courts can determine that laws enacted by Congress or actions taken by the executive violate constitutional rights.
The DSA proposes replacing the independent Supreme Court with a judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
Consider the consequence: the same political majority responsible for making the laws would exercise control over the institution responsible for determining whether those laws violate the Constitution.
The individual would lose an essential independent avenue of protection against the power of the majority.
What Happens to the Individual?
Consider these four proposals together.
Equal state representation in the Senate disappears. The states’ constitutional role in presidential selection disappears. The executive becomes subordinate to Congress. The judiciary becomes subordinate to Congress.
The result would be a substantial concentration of national political authority in the legislative majority.
This is where the threat to individual liberty becomes clear.
The Constitution protects individuals precisely because their fundamental rights are not supposed to depend upon the preferences of the majority. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments protect against the deprivation of liberty without due process of law, and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection.
These protections exist because individuals do not surrender their fundamental rights simply because their beliefs, opinions, associations, or choices are unpopular.
Imagine an individual whose political opinions, religious beliefs, associations, or personal choices conflict with those of the governing majority.
A majority might decide that certain opinions should not be expressed, that certain associations are undesirable, or that certain behaviors should be prohibited. It might attempt to turn its disapproval into law.
Under our present constitutional arrangement, the legislature is constrained by constitutional rights, the executive operates as a separate branch, and an independent judiciary can determine that a law or government action violates the Constitution—even when that decision is unpopular with the majority.
The proposed changes would substantially alter those relationships.
The same governing majority would have far greater control over the making of laws, their enforcement, and the judicial institutions responsible for reviewing their constitutionality.
The danger is not that every majority will necessarily abuse its authority. It is that the institutional safeguards that make such abuse more difficult would be weakened or eliminated.
A citizen cannot be genuinely free if the rights that protect his or her choices depend upon the permission of the political majority.
The Danger of Political Self-Preservation
There is another danger that deserves serious consideration: the temptation to preserve political power once it has been acquired.
We do not need to assume that every person who seeks political office is motivated by a desire to dominate others. But neither should we assume that those who acquire power will always exercise it responsibly or willingly surrender it.
History and comparative political research document how elected governments can gradually weaken the institutions that constrain them. This process, often called democratic backsliding, can include diminishing judicial independence, manipulating political competition, restricting opposition, and changing institutional rules in ways that favor those already in power.
Such changes do not necessarily begin with the cancellation of elections or the suspension of a constitution. They can occur through formally enacted changes to the institutions themselves.
This is why constitutional safeguards matter. They are not designed on the assumption that those who govern will always be virtuous. They are designed with the recognition that political ambition, self-interest, and the desire to retain power are enduring features of human behavior.
The DSA does not explicitly state that it intends to manipulate elections or prevent political opponents from taking power. But the structural question remains: if the proposed system concentrates legislative, executive, and judicial authority in the same political majority, what independent institutions would remain capable of preventing that majority from using its authority to protect and perpetuate its own power?
And if the governing majority could weaken the ability of its opponents to speak, organize, challenge its decisions, or compete effectively for office, what would remain of the public’s ability to remove it?
The freedom to replace those who govern is inseparable from the freedom to oppose them.
Majority Rule Is Not Majority Domination
There is a fundamental distinction between majority rule and unlimited majority power.
A majority exists only in relation to a minority. For majority rule to function as collective self-government, the minority must retain a meaningful voice, the freedom to disagree, and the possibility of becoming the majority.
Without those conditions, majority rule ceases to be a system of shared self-government. It becomes rule by those who possess power.
This is also the distinction between a constitutional republic and a system in which the majority is effectively the ultimate authority over individual rights.
A republic does not guarantee liberty simply because citizens vote for representatives. It depends upon constitutional limitations on what those representatives may do.
A public that may vote but is not free to dissent, organize, advocate alternatives, or challenge the government is not genuinely governing itself. The freedom to choose representatives depends upon the freedom to disagree with those who govern.
If the majority can dictate the boundaries of individual liberty, and the institutions that should protect those liberties are subordinate to that same majority, the public’s formal right to vote becomes an increasingly inadequate measure of its freedom.
The Question We Must Ask
There is nothing inherently improper about proposing constitutional amendments or advocating a different form of government. The Constitution provides a process for amendment.
But citizens should understand the full implications of proposals that would fundamentally alter the distribution and limitation of political power.
The DSA’s four proposals would do more than change how Americans elect a President, organize Congress, or select judges. Taken together, they would move the country away from its present system of federalism, separated powers, and independent constitutional checks, toward a much more centralized, legislature-dominated system.
The question is not simply whether that system would continue to hold elections. It is whether individuals would retain the freedom and institutional protections necessary to make those elections meaningful—and to change the government when they choose.
Who protects the individual when the majority decides that the individual’s beliefs, choices, or way of life are unacceptable?
Who protects the minority when the majority controls the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary?
And what prevents those who hold power from changing the rules to make certain they keep it?
The American constitutional system was designed to ensure that the answer to these questions is not simply the goodwill of those in power.
The majority has the right to govern. It does not own the lives, liberties, or choices of the people it governs. Nor does it have an unlimited right to determine who may challenge its authority.
In Summation
The purpose of constitutional government is not simply to determine who gets to exercise power. It is to establish what those who exercise power are not entitled to take away.
That is the essential distinction between majority rule within a Constitutional Republic and majority rule without meaningful constitutional restraint.
The four structural changes proposed by the DSA, if enacted together, lead to one central concern: the concentration of political power, the weakening of independent checks and protections and the resulting vulnerability of individual liberty.
There is one other danger of concentrating power: There is a well-documented pattern in human political behavior called democratic back-sliding or institutional capture in which groups that acquire political power can use that power to change the institutions governing political competition, to weaken restraints on themselves, and make it harder or impossible for opponents to replace them. And the DSA’s 4 proposals make that particularly relevant.
A constitutional government must never depend on the good intentions of those who hold power. We cannot say with assurance that the DSA will rig elections or suppress opponents. But what we can say is that the concentration of power resulting from enactment of their 4 proposals definitely reduce the institutional barriers against those and even worse possibilities.
Finally, do not be misled by the American tradition that the majority rules. The majority, in our Constitutional Republic has the right to g0vern but it does not have the right to govern without limits. The DSA’s proposals are designed to weaken those limits. Majority rule is NEVER a license for the majority to take away the rights and liberties of the minority.
In a Constitutional Republic, the majority decides who governs but the Constitution determines what those who govern are permitted to do. And that must be regardless of what party is in power. The Constitution protects individual’s liberty, be they in the majority or the minority.
