Los socialistas necesitan desarrollar una política constitucional

Get an introductory Jacobin subscription for just $20 L ast month, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) announced its 2026 “ Workers Deserve More ” program. The updated program concretizes DSA’s vision for a worker-centered American economy, democracy, and foreign policy. It calls for, among other things, housing for all, a Green New Deal, and public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries. Besides these reassertions of earlier priorities, buried in the program (but receiving outsize attention from far right and establishment media alike) is a novel proposal from DSA: replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.” This is a marked shift from DSA’s 2025 program, which called for the election of the president by national popular vote and a mere “reduc[tion]” in the power of the Supreme Court. DSA’s new commitment to a legislature-centered federal government comes as part of a larger left reckoning with the dangers of an overly strong presidency and judiciary. It is clear that we must push to increase Congress’s power at the expense of the president and the courts in order to enact and entrench a transformative policy program. But DSA’s commitment to changing the constitutional structure of the federal government — something achievable only through the minoritarian process of amendment — must be supplemented by what legal scholar Beau Baumann has called a “ constitutional politics ” of “legislative primacy,” which presents a theory of how to disempower the president and the courts without changing a word of the American Constitution. The Left now finds itself in the position of wielding more federal power than it has in generations; it cannot squander this chance to pass its transformative agenda and protect it from encroachment by a hostile president or skeptical courts. DSA is correct in identifying the legislative branch as its best institutional bet for advancing its transformative policy agenda. Short of constitutional amendment, acts of Congress are the most durable vehicle for policy. Executive actions without clear legislative authority can fall victim to adverse rulings from hostile courts, as Joe Biden found in attempting to cancel student loan debt. Those that are not struck down by court ruling can be easily rescinded by a subsequent reactionary president, as Donald Trump did with Barack Obama’s executive actions on climate policy. While Congress may itself reverse course — indeed, the 119th Congress’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act rescinded many of the green energy subsidies authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act — its members exist in a different political reality from presidents. They can be reelected indefinitely, whereas presidents know that after a successful reelection they themselves need never answer to voters again. They have no subordinate officials to blame any political missteps on, needing to carry the weight of any questionable votes themselves. And in the House of Representatives at least, they must answer to the electorate more frequently, allowing constituents the chance to eject their representatives soon after they step out of line. Baumann presents historical evidence that further supports the case for legislative primacy. He points out that major periods of transformative policy implementation — Reconstruction, the Progressive Era, and the New Deal — passed their programs into law through Congress an