The Democratic Socialists of America published a new program this summer, “Workers Deserve More,” drafted by a committee elected at the group’s 2025 convention. It runs through the standard left inventory: free health care, housing as a human right, a 32-hour workweek at full pay. Buried in the section on democracy sits the demand that actually matters. DSA wants to replace the president and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” Read that clause twice. Everything else in the program depends on what happens to it.
The Bill of Rights exists because the First Congress assumed that future majorities would try to silence dissenters, seize property and punish unpopular belief, and built a judiciary insulated from those majorities to stop it. Life tenure under Article III is not bureaucratic leftover. It is the mechanism that lets a court tell a legislature no.