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WASHINGTON, D.C. — Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez clarified Thursday that she does not support her fellow Democratic Socialists' plan to abolish the U.S. Senate, explaining that it would be far too difficult to eliminate an institution before first accusing it of every historical crime ever committed.
Speaking with reporters on Capitol Hill, the New York congresswoman declined to endorse the Democratic Socialists of America's latest wish list, which includes abolishing the Senate, replacing the presidency with a prime minister, restructuring the judiciary, and apparently seeing how many pages of the Constitution can be fed into a paper shredder before lunch.
"That is, of course, a constitutional question," Ms. Ocasio-Cortez told reporters, acknowledging that even revolutionary manifestos occasionally run into inconvenient details like the Constitution.
While stopping short of supporting the Senate's elimination, Ocasio-Cortez made it clear she still considers the chamber historically suspect.
"We've all got our complaints," she said. "I don't support the filibuster. I don't support elements of this institution that we know were founded on Jim Crow."
[The term 'Jim Crow' comes from a 19th century minstrel show character, Thomas Dartmouth "Daddy" Rice. He performed in blackface [see also Jimmy Kimmel, and Justin Trudeau] singing to "Jump Jim Crow," where he portrayed a stereotypical buffoonish Black man. Thus, the name "Jim Crow" became a derogatory slur for Black people, and by the end of the 19th century it was even applied to the segregation laws.
After the Civil War and the 13th Amendment ended slavery (1865) Democratic Southern states continued to limit the freedoms of Black people by passing Jim Crow laws (1870s - 1960s).
When federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877 (as part of the Compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction), Southern Democrats regained full control and systematically rolled back Black political and civil rights gained during Reconstruction. By the 1880s to the 1890s the South went nuclear with Jim Crow laws. Public transportation, restaurants, schools, parks, hospitals and restrooms, were segregated. Interracial marriages were outlawed and there were poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and additional roadblocks to disenfranchise Black voters [until they started voting for Democrats].
But by the mid-20th century, Jim Crow laws began crumbling. In 1954 Brown v. Board of Education was the start, followed by the Montgomery Bus Boycott ignited by Rosa Parks, the sit-ins of the 1960s; the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which banned public segregation and employment discrimination; and finally the 1965 Voting Rights Act that outlawed discriminatory voting practices.
During the entire Jim Crow era, (approximately 1877 to the mid-1960s) it was the Democratic Party's Southern wing that was responsible for creating, passing, defending and enforcing Jim Crow laws.
For example, President Wilson, a Democrat, segregated the federal workforce in 1913. And the Southern Democrats dominated Congress for decades and used seniority and the filibuster to block civil rights legislation; not the Republicans who fought against it. By 1948, Southern Democrats broke away from the Dixiecrat party in order to defend segregation.
Meanwhile, Republicans were generally supportive of civil rights at this period. So Black voters in the South overwhelmingly supported the GOP in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as national Republicans overwhelmingly opposed Jim Crow measures.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 were signed by Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, it faced strong opposition from Southern Democrats in Congress and it was the Republicans that provided the crucial votes to overcome filibusters. However, this realigned the two parties as the Democrats took credit for both Acts and Black voters in the South, began voting Democratic.
Historians reportedly spent several hours trying to determine exactly how Congress, an institution created in 1789 managed to be "founded on Jim Crow," which emerged nearly a century later, before concluding that modern political rhetoric no longer observes the constraints of linear time.Bottom line: Jim Crow was a Southern Democratic project. While not every Democrat supported it (especially many Northern ones later on), the political machinery that built and maintained the system was overwhelmingly in Democratic hands in the South for nearly a century.]
The Democratic Socialists' platform also calls for replacing the presidency with a parliamentary system, making the judiciary subordinate to Congress, ending American support for Israel, and prosecuting U.S. and Israeli leaders for what it describes as "genocide in Gaza." Political observers noted that the platform appears to have been assembled by asking, "What if Reddit moderated the Federalist Papers?"
Constitutional scholars pointed out that abolishing the Senate would require an amendment approved by two thirds of Congress and ratified by three quarters of the states, making the proposal only slightly more realistic than getting every member of Congress to voluntarily delete their social media accounts.
Although Ocasio-Cortez has been floated as a potential 2028 presidential candidate with support from the DSA, she insisted she is not currently running for another office.
"I could run for dog catcher," she said with a chuckle. "So I think any situation is hypothetical."
Sources confirmed that within minutes, several progressive activists demanded the office of dog catcher also be abolished because golden retrievers have historically benefited from systemic privilege.
