The Democratic Socialists of America are winning primaries across the country, and some Democrats are starting to panic.
Now four of them put their names on paper to prove it.
And what happened next tells you everything about how this fight inside the Democrat Party is actually going.
The Amendment That Never Got a Vote
Four House Democrats put forward their own resolution recently to condemn the Democratic Socialists of America in response to a GOP effort to force Democrats to vote on a similar resolution put forward by Rep. Jeff Crank (R-CO). Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Hillary Scholten (D-MI), Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), and Tom Suozzi (D-NY) put forward an amendment to Crank’s resolution that explicitly condemns both socialism and the DSA.
Crank’s resolution included a version of the SAVE Act, President Donald Trump’s voter-ID bill. The amendment offered by the four Democrats removes that part of the resolution, allowing for a more straight-up and down vote on the text condemning the DSA.
The amendment’s text began: “Whereas socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has, time and time again, collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and repressive dictatorships.” That is not a mild statement. That is a direct indictment of the Marxist project that the DSA openly champions.
The amendment’s language also noted that the DSA calls for lifting and removing sanctions on hostile foreign governments — including Iran, Cuba, and North Korea — who seek to harm Americans and target American armed forces, jeopardizing the national security of the United States.
The authors listed the failures of socialism in other nations and several controversial DSA positions, like abolishing capitalism and the armed forces, and called the DSA’s ideology “incompatible with American values and the United States Constitution.” It also stripped out the provision related to the SAVE America Act.
The GOP resolution advanced out of the House Rules Committee without allowing a vote on the amendment. Republicans blocked it. The Democrat four got shut out before the floor vote ever happened.
What the SAVE Act Fight Actually Reveals
The SAVE Act is a commonsense measure to protect election integrity and ensure only American citizens decide American elections. It requires proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo identification to cast a ballot. Republicans included it in the resolution because it belongs there — the same DSA that wants to abolish the Senate and hand citizenship benefits to illegal aliens obviously has no interest in protecting the integrity of the ballot box.
“I mean, it’s really trying to show the Republicans are not serious about wanting to do that, right?” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) told The Hill. “This is just political games.”
But here is what Moskowitz left out. Most of his colleagues refused to vote for the combined resolution precisely because it included the SAVE Act. Several other Democrat moderates told Axios they may have supported Gottheimer’s resolution but cannot stomach voting to support the SAVE America Act. So the DSA condemnation was never really the sticking point. Election integrity was.
Scholten argued that including the SAVE America Act “dilutes the power of what this socialism resolution is and should be attempting to do.” “If the Republican leadership truly wants to have a conversation about socialism, then let’s have the real conversation we need to have about it,” Scholten told The Hill.
That is a revealing complaint. The four Democrats who put their names on this amendment are self-described moderates performing opposition to socialism while simultaneously objecting to a bill that would require voters to prove they are American citizens. Those two positions sit uneasily next to each other.
Gottheimer and the DSA’s Growing Footprint
Gottheimer, a conservative Democrat in a swing district, has become one of the top critics of the DSA, often appearing on Fox News and other outlets to condemn the group and its leaders like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D).
Gottheimer told Axios he has “been clear that I don’t think the DSA are Democrats.” “They’re against our leadership, they’re against our values, and they’re running on an extremist platform,” he said.
And Gottheimer is right that the DSA is not a harmless progressive faction. The organization’s own platform openly calls for government seizure of major corporations, the abolition of the Senate, replacement of the Presidency and Supreme Court with bodies subordinate to Congress, and the creation of a classless society. These are textbook Marxist objectives that would dismantle the constitutional republic and private property rights. The DSA also calls for abolishing ICE, ending all deportations, and granting amnesty to every illegal alien regardless of status.
Crank told Fox News Digital that he wanted to force Democrats to go on the record with his resolution. “I keep hearing people like Hakeem Jeffries and others in the Congress saying that they oppose the DSA. Let’s see if they’re willing to vote for a resolution that would oppose them,” Crank said.
That is the core of what Crank was doing. Forcing a vote. Making people choose. And the result was instructive: most Democrats voted no, eight broke ranks to vote yes, and the four who offered the competing amendment never got their clean vote at all.
Democrat Reps. Jared Golden (Maine), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), Kathy Castor (Fla.), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Don Davis (N.C.), Darren Soto (Fla.) and Gabe Vasquez (N.M.) all voted for the resolution denouncing socialism, bucking Democrat leadership.
All eight “yes” votes are in competitive races for their seat this year. Six of those races are rated as “toss-up” or “lean Republican” by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Rep. Scholten grabbed headlines in recent weeks over her fierce criticism of progressive Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whom she has accused of vehement sexism and slammed for campaigning with Hasan Piker.
The DSA’s rise is not an abstraction. The vote comes amid a string of victories by socialist candidates, including Melat Kiros in Denver and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York, who have ousted longtime Democratic incumbents. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani also defeated the Democratic establishment in last year’s mayoral race. Those victories have coincided with a surge in DSA membership.
Every one of those victories was a primary win. The DSA is not winning general elections — it is taking over the Democrat Party from the inside, one primary at a time, pushing America down the path of failed Marxism while the self-described moderates wring their hands and put forward amendments that never get a vote.
Gottheimer and the three Democrats who joined him deserve some credit for putting their names on a document that calls socialism what it is. But the broader picture here is that the Democrat Party’s institutional leadership — the Hakeem Jeffries wing — refused to embrace even that. The House Rules Committee, controlled by Republicans, blocked the amendment. But Democrat leaders never rallied behind it either.
The DSA’s platform calls for the government seizure of the largest corporations and essential industries, the abolition of the Senate, and a classless society built on the rubble of the American free-market system. History has answered that experiment repeatedly and brutally — in the Soviet Union, in Maoist China, in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The amendment Gottheimer’s office put forward named those failures explicitly. Most of his colleagues still would not vote for the combined resolution that made the same case.
What that tells the American public is simple enough. For all the talk about moderate Democrats pushing back on the socialist left, the party’s actual voting behavior tells a different story. Eight members broke ranks. The rest held the line for a party that increasingly shares space with an openly Marxist organization that wants to abolish the institutions that protect every American’s freedom and property.
The SAVE Act is not a poison pill. It is a protection. And the fact that so many Democrats find it impossible to vote for a bill that simply asks voters to prove they are citizens — even when that bill is paired with a condemnation of Marxist socialism — says more about where the Democrat Party actually stands than any floor speech ever could.
Source: Mediaite, “Four House Democrats Put Forward Their Own Resolution Condemning the DSA”