Last 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.