On Fox News Sunday, DSA national co-chair Megan Romer said true, yep, or absolutely to abolishing the Senate, ICE, the presidency, the Supreme Court, national borders and the Pentagon.
Shannon Bream did not have to work hard for this one. She simply read the list. Abolish the Senate. "True," Romer said. Abolish ICE. Affirmed. Defund the Pentagon. "Absolutely." Replace the presidency and the Supreme Court as they currently exist. "Absolutely." Open the borders, as a long-term plan. "Yep." Government ownership of most large corporations. "Yeah, absolutely." Phase out prisons. That too made the list, and Romer did not flinch from it.
This aired July 26 on Fox News Sunday, and it was not a gotcha clip stitched together from old footage. It was a sitting co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America walking through her organization's platform, item by item, on live national television, with a straight face and no hedging. Mediaite, an outlet with no love for Fox, ran the exchange too and called it a wild interview. That is one point of agreement across the spectrum: this happened, on the record, in Romer's own words.
Three weeks earlier, in Colorado's 1st Congressional District, 30-year incumbent Diana DeGette lost her Democratic primary to Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old DSA-backed challenger endorsed by Bernie Sanders. DeGette had held that seat since 1997. Colorado Politics and The Hill both covered the concession, and both described it the same way: a warning shot from the party's activist base to every Democrat who assumed incumbency was insurance.
Romer's interview lands in that context, not before it. DSA is not asking to be let into the tent anymore. It is telling incumbents what happens if they do not move.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries got a preview of that pressure the same day. On CNN, in an interview with Dana Bash, Jeffries would not commit to ruling out a vote on abolishing ICE if Democrats retake the House this fall. He downplayed the idea rather than embracing it, which is its own kind of answer. Sixteen state and city legislators have already sent letters urging Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to back abolition outright. Jeffries has separately said Democrats are "on the right side" in refusing to fund what he called ICE's mass deportation operations. He is threading a needle between a base that wants ICE gone and a general electorate that, by most polling, does not.
What the list actually says
Look at what Romer put on the table, not as slogans but as line items. No Senate. No immigration enforcement agency. No standing military budget at current levels. No presidency or Supreme Court as designed by the Constitution. No enforced national border, eventually. No prisons, eventually. Public ownership of the corporations that run most of the economy.
That is not a tweak to immigration policy or a complaint about a specific agency director. It is a rewrite of the constitutional architecture of the federal government, the criminal justice system and the market economy, delivered by someone who co-chairs a group that just knocked off a sitting member of Congress.
Democratic leaders have spent years insisting that Republicans exaggerate how far left their party has drifted. Romer did not leave much room for that argument this time. She answered the questions herself, in full sentences, without a staffer walking it back afterward.
The midterms are just over three months out. Jeffries and Schumer now have to decide, seat by seat, whether to run from Romer's answers or make peace with the wing of the party that gave them. DeGette's loss suggests the second option is not free either. Voters in Colorado's 1st District already showed what happens when an incumbent tries to stay in the middle while the base moves. Watch which other Democrats get the same treatment before November.
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