On Sunday, Democratic Socialists of America national co-chair Megan Romer sat with Shannon Bream on Fox News and went through a true-or-false list. Abolish the Senate: true. Abolish ICE: absolutely. Abolish borders and grant amnesty: as a long-term plan, yes. Replace the presidency and the Supreme Court. Defund the Pentagon. Phase out prisons. Move large corporations into public ownership.
She could have dodged every one. Politicians do it hourly, and the technique is well developed. She did not.
Get the words right
The reaction has already blurred them. The DSA platform, released this month as “Workers Deserve More,” calls for abolishing the Senate in favor of a unicameral Congress. On the presidency and the Supreme Court, the language is replace, not abolish. Those are different proposals, and the second is not a plan for having no courts.
Romer also said repeatedly that abolishing borders and prisons are long-term goals rather than immediate demands. Cutting that qualifier out is the cheapest possible edit, and it is the one nearly everyone made.
I am not going to pretend the honest version is reassuring. A unicameral Congress with no presidency and no Supreme Court is not a reform of the American constitutional order. It is a replacement of it, and she said so. Getting the words right does not soften that. It just means the criticism survives contact with the transcript.
The format did her no favors, and she chose it
A true-or-false round is built to strip reasoning. There is a serious literature behind prison abolition, and it describes a decades-long project of shrinking what we criminalize until incarceration becomes rare — not opening the gates on a Tuesday. None of that fits in the word true.
She sat for it anyway and answered plainly. Whatever else, that is more candor than the format usually produces, and more than most officeholders offer about what they actually want.
The question this leaves
The DSA runs its candidates on the Democratic ballot line. Romer defended that on structural grounds, which is fair — American ballot access punishes third parties brutally, and she did not pretend otherwise.
But it means voters in a Democratic primary are choosing between candidates whose parties disagree about whether the United States should keep having a Senate. Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of New York, said last year that his platform is not the same as national DSA’s, and also that DSA remains his political home. Both can be true. Voters are still entitled to know which document they are voting for.
Senator Fetterman criticized his own party for not answering that. Representative Cuellar said the socialists are using it. Speaker Johnson called them barbarians inside the gate, which is the sort of line that ends thinking rather than starting it.
Romer did the useful thing here. She told everyone exactly what her organization wants. The Democratic Party now has to say, out loud, whether it wants the same.
Add your perspective
Left: a yes-or-no gotcha segment is not a policy debate, and every abolitionist position has reasoning behind it that the format was designed to remove. Right: the platform is published, the co-chair confirmed it, and pretending it is aspirational is how radical positions become mainstream unopposed. Center if the real story is ballot-line fusion letting two parties share one primary while telling voters different things.
