The Democratic Socialists of America's national co-chair went on Fox News Sunday and calmly affirmed her organization's platform, abolishing the Senate, ICE, prisons, and national borders, while the Democratic Party struggles to contain a socialist wing it helped create.
Megan Romer, the DSA's national co-chair, sat across from host Shannon Bream and answered a series of direct questions about the organization's official positions. Abolish the Senate? "True," Romer said. Abolish ICE? Yes. Abolish prisons? Yes. Eliminate national borders? Yes. Defund the Pentagon? Yes. Grant amnesty to every person living in the country illegally? Yes. Shift most large corporations to public ownership? Yes. Replace the presidency and the Supreme Court? Yes. Fox News Digital reported that Romer "fired off a series of 'yes' and 'true' responses" without hesitation.
The exchange was not an ambush. It was a straightforward policy interview, and Romer treated it as an opportunity, not a trap. She did not hedge, walk back, or reframe. She owned every position on the DSA platform and offered a constitutional rationale for the most radical of them.
Romer's defense of abolishing the Senate was the most detailed answer she gave. She called the upper chamber "an anachronistic institution" and traced its origins to the British House of Lords, a body designed, in her telling, to insulate power from ordinary citizens.
Her full argument, as she put it to Bream:
"It comes from the British House of Lords. The Senate was part of the system that was made to make sure that the people didn't have too much of a say. So we want to expand [Congress] significantly, but make it a unicameral legislature."
That framing turns the Founders' design for a deliberative republic into an obstacle to be removed. The Senate exists precisely to slow legislation, force compromise across state lines, and prevent bare majorities from steamrolling minority interests. Romer's position treats those features as bugs, not safeguards.
The DSA has gone further than Romer's on-air comments. The New York Post reported that the organization released a "Workers Deserve More" manifesto calling to scrap the executive branch, the Senate, and the Electoral College in favor of a European-style parliamentary system. That document puts the DSA's ambitions in writing, not just abolishing the Senate, but dismantling the constitutional separation of powers entirely.
Romer's candor might matter less if the DSA were a fringe outfit with no electoral foothold. It is not. DSA-backed candidates have defeated several establishment Democrats in primary elections, making the organization the leading force on the party's progressive wing. That pattern has played out across multiple states and election cycles.
In Colorado, a democratic socialist ousted a 15-term incumbent in a congressional primary, one of the most dramatic examples of how DSA-aligned candidates are replacing longtime Democrats from the left.
Romer explained the strategy plainly. She said the DSA runs candidates on the Democratic ballot line because the two major parties have, "over years and decades, created a system where ballot line access is extremely difficult for third parties." In other words, the DSA is not building its own party. It is borrowing the Democratic Party's infrastructure, running its candidates under the Democratic banner, and pushing the party's platform further left from the inside.
"We run on the Democratic ballot line where it makes sense. We run [independents] sometimes where that is a viable possibility, but it's a ballot line. What matters is what the voters think, and the voters are overwhelmingly choosing our candidates."
That last claim, "the voters are overwhelmingly choosing our candidates", is a bold assertion from the co-chair of an organization whose platform includes abolishing borders and prisons. What it really reflects is the DSA's success in low-turnout primaries, where a motivated activist base can outperform a complacent establishment.
A Pew poll found roughly one-third of Democrats favor democratic socialist leaders, a figure that helps explain how DSA candidates keep clearing primary fields, and why Democratic leadership has been slow to push back.
Some Democrats have noticed the problem. A growing number of prominent figures within the party have warned that embracing DSA positions risks alienating general-election voters. The Washington Examiner noted that centrist Democratic figures including Van Jones and Bill Maher have disavowed their party's leftward shift ahead of November midterm elections.
Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat referenced in Fox News coverage, has publicly rejected the DSA agenda and accused socialists of trying to "use" the Democratic Party. That criticism tracks with what Romer herself admitted on air, the DSA is, by design, a parasite on the Democratic ballot line, fielding candidates who hold positions far outside the American mainstream.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise framed the stakes in blunt terms. Breitbart reported his warning:
"DSA isn't just gaining influence in New York or California... these ideas could be coming to your community sooner than you think."
The most revealing case study may be New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the DSA's most prominent elected official. The New York Post reported that Mamdani has tried to distance himself from some of the organization's more radical positions, telling reporters, "My platform is not the same as national DSA." But he has not left the organization. He still calls the DSA his "political home" and says he remains "a proud member."
That is the pattern: DSA-aligned politicians adopt the organization's endorsement, benefit from its activist infrastructure, win primaries with its support, and then claim distance from its platform when the positions become politically inconvenient. The platform does not change. The talking points do.
The same dynamic has surfaced in Michigan, where a Senate candidate headlined DSA events and raised money for socialists before telling voters he was not, in fact, a socialist. That kind of selective branding works in primaries. It tends to collapse under general-election scrutiny.
Romer described several of the DSA's most extreme positions as part of a "long-term vision." That framing is meant to soften the impact, to make abolishing national borders sound aspirational rather than actionable. But the DSA is not a think tank publishing white papers. It is an organization that recruits, trains, funds, and elects candidates to public office. Its platform is not a wish list. It is a set of instructions for the officials it puts in power.
Consider what the full DSA platform demands, as Romer confirmed on national television: no Senate, no ICE, no borders, no prisons, no presidency, no Supreme Court, a defunded Pentagon, amnesty for every illegal immigrant, and government ownership of most large corporations. That is not reform. It is the wholesale replacement of the American constitutional order with something unrecognizable.
And the DSA is not running candidates in some parallel universe. It is running them, and winning, inside the Democratic Party. Michigan saw a DSA-aligned Senate candidate demand ICE abolition at a rally flanked by some of the party's biggest progressive names. These are not abstract policy debates. They are campaign platforms backed by real candidates with real chances of holding office.
The question is not whether the DSA believes what it says. Megan Romer settled that on Sunday. She believes every word. The question is whether the Democratic Party will keep pretending it can host an organization committed to abolishing the Senate, the presidency, borders, prisons, and the Supreme Court, and still call itself a party of constitutional governance.
Romer gave the country a gift: honesty. Now voters can decide whether the party that shares a ballot line with the DSA deserves their trust.
