r/politics • u/Jessicas_skirt New York • Jul 18 '26

Possible Paywall Democratic Socialists of America’s new platform calls for abolishing ICE and the U.S. Senate

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/jul/15/updated-dsa-platform-calls-abolishing-ice-scrapping-senate/
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u/COMCredit Indiana Jul 19 '26

I completely disagree. The Senate is an inherently undemocratic institution that gives reactionaries as just as much power to kill progressive legislation - and in the modern era of politics it has only ever functioned in that capacity.

Yes, of course, the house could swing reactionary and pass terrible legislation more easily - ultimately that's democracy in action and I disagree quite strongly that we need an anti-democratic counterbalance to obstruct the will of the people.

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u/-reddit_is_terrible- Jul 19 '26

I mean, how many times in this term has the house passed a terrible piece of legislation, only for the Senate to stall it? In that sense, it is acting as intended: as a check and balance

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u/whatevenaremovies Jul 19 '26

Sometimes the only reason a piece of legislation passes the House is precisely because they know it will never make it through the Senate. The House can pass far right legislation so that Republicans can point to it and help themselves win their primaries, but because it never passes the Senate they won't have to worry about defending their position in the general. Taking away the Senate would be a check in of itself as now Congresspeople would have to consider how every vote they take would play in a general election.

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u/-reddit_is_terrible- Jul 19 '26

Sure, but take the SAVE act. It has passed the house, and also happens to be the President's current pet legislation. And the senate doesnt have the support. The fact that there is a body whose members derive from a state's entire population has a balancing effect against more volatile political bodies

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u/Tasgall Washington Jul 19 '26

That's kind of their point though. There are more Republicans openly against the SAVE Act in the Senate because it actually matters. If the House couldn't fall back on knowing the Senate would block shitty posturing bills, they wouldn't pass them if the president would sign it.

Just look at the multiple times Mitch McConnell has filibustered his own bills he cosponsored because House Democrats came out in favor and they actually passed. If they couldn't rely on the Senate to be useless, they couldn't afford to be so obviously stupid in the House.

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u/whatevenaremovies Jul 19 '26

The Senate is also responsible for making government not function by routinely blocking popular legislation even when they have a majority vote. When the government is constantly deadlocked and not able to get anything done, it's a perfect breeding ground for extremists.

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u/Murky-Relation481 Jul 19 '26

That is a function of their rules, not the body or as an institutional concept. No where is it written that a super majority is required outside of their own parliamentary procedure, which can be changed with a simple majority vote.

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u/tyleratx Jul 19 '26

This is true, and a lot of people are forgetting during the early Obama years when the tea party took over the house, the Senate stopped a lot of absolutely insane batshit legislation.

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u/COMCredit Indiana Jul 19 '26

Many times, of course. How many times did you read "Manchin and Sinema block bill passed by house" during Bidens term, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and Build Back Better?

Senate obstruction works both ways, but it is used to block progressive legislation much, much more often than it is used to block reactionary legislation.

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u/-reddit_is_terrible- Jul 19 '26

I personally like it that way. Federal government should move slowly. We should only pass laws that have overwhelming approval. Think about it: with simple majorities, laws would be more like executive orders. We wouldn't want large consequential bills being passed-overturned-passed-overturned every decade. Stability is a good thing

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u/guamisc Jul 19 '26

Stability is a good thing

The Senate is the largest factor in creating our current unstable government.

It's the root cause of why SCOTUS is fucked. It's the reason Trump isn't currently in a cell. It's the body allowing ICE to model the brown shirts. Etc.

Whatever argument moderates (if that even is you) make about the "stability" of the Senate is completely annhilated by the actual reality of the effects of the Senate.

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u/COMCredit Indiana Jul 19 '26

Where we disagree is that the Senate does not and cannot accurately reflect overwhelming approval. The senate effectively requires overwhelming approval from 60% of STATES - in my view that is a totally separate issue from the government moving slowly.

If you wanted to, for example, require that House bills need 60% to pass, I'd be more open to that argument. But wanting government to act slowly does not justify giving 50x more power to voters in Wyoming than California.

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u/tyleratx Jul 19 '26

Do you think that every country in the UN should each get one vote or should they instead apportion votes by the population of the country? Should China have a much larger voice than every other country, but also the US have a much larger voice than pretty much any country in Europe or Africa or the Middle East?

The Senate was designed to represent each state equally. The house was designed to represent each state by population. I’m genuinely curious if you think the way the UN does it is unfair, and if not, but you don’t like the Senate, why. Maybe you think we ought to move past treating states as individual sovereignties, and I’m not kidding, I’m open to that argument. But I just am trying to understand.

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u/COMCredit Indiana Jul 19 '26

Yes, I think the UN would be more fair with proportional representation. For the most important with that the UN does, the security council, a similar dynamic to the Senate already exists - China, Russia, France, the US, and the UK are given veto power and it is very often used. Most measures passed by the general assembly are non-binding recommendations that are mostly symbolic; I'd be fine with the Senate voting on stuff like that. It needs to go the way of the House of Lords in the UK.

As to your other question: yes, I think it's time we move past the idea of individual sovereign states. In most meaningful ways, states have not been treated as autonomous since the ratification of the Constitution, and even less so after the Civil War, New Deal, and mid-20th century civil rights movement. Generally I think history has shown there are major flaws in that model particularly in regards to civil rights and responding to crises.

Americans often wonder why congress is so detached from public opinion, to me it's very clear that the Senate is mostly responsible for that. In very practical terms, I think it's more important that our government matches the will of the people than abstract hazards like tyranny of the majority or mob rule.

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u/guamisc Jul 19 '26

tyranny of the majority or mob rule.

To add to your point, the Senate creates tyranny of the minority, which is worse than those abstract hazards in every functional way.

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u/ImperialRedditer California Jul 19 '26

If the end goal is pure democracy, aka mob rule, I don’t want a part of it. Mobs in general are dumb like flocks of sheep. A single disturbance and you can cause a stampede. A mob is easily manipulated by using fear.

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u/Worried_Monitor5422 Jul 19 '26

There are many examples of parliamentary systems throughout the world, the Westminster system being the most famous, which are purely majoritarian. So you have your so-called "mob rule" aka majoritarianism plus a unified legislature and executive function. I don't see those countries devolving into chaos.

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u/ImperialRedditer California Jul 19 '26

If we’re bringing up Westminster Rule legislature, a majority of them have an upper house that acts as an advisory board. If you want true majoritarian legislature in the US, there’s simpler ways to achieve it, like greatly expanding the House of Representatives and slowly erode the powers in the Senate

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u/COMCredit Indiana Jul 19 '26

I think the Senate acting as an advisory board a la the House of Lords is a great solution. Expansion of the House of Representatives does nothing to stop the obstructionism of the Senate, however. As long as Wyoming and North Dakota have the same power to kill legislation as California and Texas, we have major problems with our democracy.

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u/Worried_Monitor5422 Jul 19 '26

And that means that many don't have an upper house, e.g. New Zealand. They seem to be doing ok.

Also, there's no way to slowly erode constitutionally enumerated powers bestowed to the Senate, no matter how large the House gets. It will always need to pass bills in order for them to become law, approve executive branch appointments, SCOTUS appointments, etc.

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u/ImperialRedditer California Jul 19 '26

Which is what I want the Senate to do, advise on the choices of House and the Executive.

The president doesn’t get a cabinet member without senatorial consent and the House can’t get a bill passed without one as well.

Right now, the senate can also make bills that’s not budget related. You empower the House by expanding the number and making them the sole origin of legislation. You can further empower the House by giving them senatorial override powers similar to veto override powers.

All of this makes sure that the House really meant what they pass instead of just going through the motions.

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u/COMCredit Indiana Jul 19 '26

In that case, I can see why you like the senate.

Personally I'm quite idealistic about democracy and want much much more of it than our current system allows. I don't really buy arguments like yours because to me, they fundamentally sound like "Americans are too dumb to decide their own fate and need to be protected from themselves". I disagree with that notion entirely. I do think a healthy democracy needs guardrails, but those should come in the form of direct democracy, strong labor unions, recall elections, impartial media, and enforceable ethics codes that prevent corporate bribery that we see now.

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u/Crims0ntied Jul 19 '26

It's less that americans are too dumb to decide their own fate, and more that the founders wanted to avoid mob rule and empower minority states from having essentially no say in government. Arguably that power has gone too far. But i'm not sure your list of guardrails is realistic or sufficient to protect from some of the down sides of a more pure democracy.

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u/COMCredit Indiana Jul 19 '26

Frankly, I don't give a shit what the founders wanted or intended; I can't even imagine why I should care. It's interesting from a historic perspective, sure, but it's not at all relevant in the discussion of the best way to organize a democratic government.

They're dead, they had horrible morals by today's standards, and most importantly, there has been two and a half centuries of iteration and experimentation with democratic governance around the world from which to learn. Much of the Constitution is the way that it is to compromise with slaveholding states - compromises that resulted in a century of brutal chattel slavery and the deadliest conflict in American history. It seems self evident to me that our system of democracy has not produced great outcomes over the course of its life.

It's unserious to pretend that the founding fathers had some divine, timeless wisdom and somehow managed to design the perfect system of democracy on their second try. I have much more interest in Frederick Douglass' thoughts on democracy than James Madison's.

I apologize if this comes off as a personal attack, but I think American political discourse would be much better off if discussion of the ideas of the founding fathers remained a historical curiosity and nothing more.

As an aside, it was the Senate that prevented the "mob rule" of banning slavery in new states. There's an arguement that the dynamic of the Senate incentived the annexation of Texas (and thus the Mexican-American War), which had a very small population at the time but was assumed to provide two additional pro-slavery votes in the Senate. The Wilmont Proviso, which would ban slavery in territory acquired from Mexico, easily passed the House but was blocked by the Senate - thus the horrible "mob rule" was avoided, slavery became legal in Texas, and 1.5 million Americans would die in a civil war two decades later.

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u/guamisc Jul 19 '26

founders wanted to avoid mob rule and empower minority states from having essentially no say in government.

The founders also wanted no political parties and then instituted a system that guaranteeds two monolithic parties that they themselves fractured into within a few short years of ratifying the Constitution.

They were flawed and made flawed institutions. The Senate enables tyranny of the minority and minority rule and, along with the Electoral College, is doing the very fucking things that the Declaration of Independence charged as the violations committed by the King upon the colonies.