The Democrats' Blueprint For Permanent Power

Authored by Stu Cvrk via American Greatness,The Constitution supplies legitimate ways to change those rules via the constitutional amendment process and nearly every item on the Democrat agenda is designed to bypass it.Every generation of Americans is told that some emergency justifies setting the Constitution aside just this once. Today's "emergency" comes with a slogan: saving democracy. Strip away the branding, and the Democrat Party's structural agenda looks like something entirely different - and reminiscent of the old Bolsheviki power play 100 years ago but recast for gaining control of U.S. institutions. Two new states, a packed Supreme Court, the end of the filibuster, an end run around the Electoral College, federal control of elections, and a government apparatus for policing "disinformation" are not a plan to save democracy. Taken together, they are a plan to make a future Democrat Party majority permanent. That was the Bolsheviki goal, too.Let's examine their plan in detail.THE DESIGN THEY WANT TO DISMANTLEThe Framers did not trust majorities, and they did not trust themselves. James Madison put it plainly in Federalist No. 51: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The Senate's equal representation (the "Great Compromise"), the Electoral College, life tenure for judges, and the states' control of their own elections were all built to slow down any faction that captured a temporary majority. The Constitution also supplies legitimate ways to change those rules via the constitutional amendment process and Article V, both of which require broad agreement across the states. Nearly every item on the Democrat agenda is designed to bypass it.FOUR NEW SENATORS BY SIMPLE STATUTEThe Framers deliberately placed the national capital in a federal district outside any state so that no state could hold the federal government hostage. Democrats propose to undo that choice with an ordinary bill. The House passed DC statehood 216-208 on a straight party-line vote in 2021. The new state would be one of the most lopsidedly Democratic jurisdictions in the nation, guaranteeing two Senate seats for one party in perpetuity. The bill does not even resolve its own constitutional defect. The Twenty-Third Amendment would still award three electoral votes to the leftover federal enclave, which legal scholars warn could leave a handful of residents controlling them.Puerto Rico is the second half of the gambit. Its 2024 plebiscite was non-binding and boycotted by much of the opposition, and statehood's 58.61 percent vote came on a ballot that did not even offer the current status as an option. Democrats are pressing ahead anyway because they are betting on the seats. States, unlike ordinary legislation, cannot simply be stripped of their statehood. That is precisely the attraction. That, and two more Democrat senators in perpetuity.PACKING THE COURTFranklin Roosevelt tried to enlarge the Supreme Court in 1937, and his own party's Senate rejected it. That rejection held for nearly ninety years as a bipartisan norm. Today's extremist Democrats talk openly of a thirteen-member Court, and even President Biden's own commission could report nothing more than "profound disagreement" on the idea.Court expansion has exactly one purpose: changing future decisions on issues the current court dislikes. Hugo Chavez understood this when he enlarged Venezuela's supreme court in 2004 and filled the new seats with loyalists.A court packed to deliver results is no longer a check on power; it is an instrument of it.KILLING THE FILIBUSTERThe filibuster is the minority's last line of defense in the Senate, and the Democrats defended it vigorously whenever they were in the minority. In January 2022, 48 Senate Democrats voted to break it so they could federalize election law, and every Republican voted to keep it. Compare that with Republican restraint: when President Trump publicly demanded in 2025 that Senate Republicans abolish the filibuster, Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) refused.One party treats the rules as guardrails. The other treats them as obstacles.ABOLISHING THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE THROUGH THE BACK DOORThe National Popular Vote Interstate Compact now holds 222 electoral votes and needs only 48 more so that participating states would collectively control a majority of the Electoral College (270 of 538), guaranteeing that the national popular-vote winner also wins the presidency. It does not amend the Constitution; it simply arranges for states to hand their electors to whoever wins the national tally, even when their own voters choose someone else. For South Dakota and every other small state, the Electoral College is the reason presidential candidates must care about anyone outside a dozen metropolitan areas. The compact would erase that without a single vote of the people under Article V or a constitutional amendment.ELECTIONS WITHOUT VERIFICATIONIt is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, yet Democrats fight every effort to verify citizenship. The SAVE Act, which would require documentary proof of citizenship to register, passed the House in April 2025 with just four Democrat votes and has been blocked in the Senate by the Democrats. Furthermore, 143 House Democrats voted to preserve a DC law letting noncitizens, including illegal aliens and foreign diplomats, vote in local elections.California shows where this leads. In 2016, Democrats legalized unlimited third-party ballot collection, allowing anyone, including paid political operatives, to gather and deliver other people's ballots. In 2018, Republican leads in several California House races evaporated in the weeks after Election Day as harvested ballots arrived. Meanwhile, Oregon admitted in 2024 that its motor-voter system had registered more than 1,200 potential noncitizens.Democrats insist the numbers are tiny. Perhaps they are, but that seems unlikely. A party truly confident of that would welcome proof of citizenship instead of filibustering all attempts to require it. In a system with unlimited ballot handling and no citizenship check, nobody can be fully certain who cast the ballots that turned states like California and Colorado deep blue after decades of purple (and even red) voting.California's conduct this month tells the rest of the story. The Justice Department says it has identified at least 20,000 likely noncitizens on California's rolls who were mailed ballots for the midterm elections, and a federal prosecutor says each name was individually reviewed by a federal employee. The Justice Department has already charged 28 noncitizens in the state with federal election crimes. Rather than verify those names before counting, Democrat-controlled California and Los Angeles County fought the Justice Department's request simply to set the ballots aside. If the list is as flawed as state officials claim, verification will prove it. Holding 20,000 ballots until it does would cost nothing but time.California chose to count first and ask questions later. It is easy to discern why.In Texas during this year's midterm elections, The New York Times reported that James Talarico received more votes for U.S. senator (5,445,121 votes as of the latest available count) than Kamala Harris did during the 2024 presidential election (4,835,250 votes). Historically, this would be a remarkable anomaly, since presidential elections almost always generate substantially higher turnout than midterm elections, making it unusual for a U.S. Senate candidate to receive more votes in a midterm than a major-party presidential nominee received in the state's preceding presidential election. This is strangely reminiscent of Joe Biden's elusive "81 million votes" in 2020.POLICING SPEECHIn April 2022, Biden's Department of Homeland Security unveiled a Disinformation Governance Board. Shades of George Orwell's "Ministry of Truth"! Public outrage forced a pause within weeks, and the board was formally terminated that August.The impulse behind it did not die - nor is it likely to anytime soon. A federal trial court found that Biden administration officials had likely coerced or significantly encouraged social media platforms to suppress disfavored posts; the Supreme Court sidestepped the question on standing grounds, over a sharp dissent from Justice Alito. Hillary Clinton told MSNBC in 2024 that Americans spreading what she called propaganda should perhaps be civilly or even criminally charged. Barack Obama told a Stanford audience in 2022 that regulation of online platforms "has to be part of the answer."When the party's elder statesmen talk this way, believe them.WEAPONIZING ENFORCEMENTThe same instinct showed up in law enforcement. In October 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland directed the FBI to address threats against school boards after parents across the country had protested mask mandates and race-based curricula, and he refused to rescind the memo even after the school boards group that requested it apologized. In 2023, the FBI's Richmond field office produced a memo treating "radical-traditionalist" Catholics as a potential extremist threat; it was withdrawn only after it leaked, and a later congressional investigation found similar language in at least 13 other FBI documents.A government that treats dissenting parents and devout Catholics as security concerns has shown what it would do with even fewer constraints.THE PATTERN: WIN ONCE, NEVER LOSE AGAINTake each proposal on its own, and Democrats can offer a high-minded rationale for support. Put them together, and the design is unmistakable. New states expand the (Democrat) Senate majority. An abolished filibuster lets the majority legislate at will. A packed Court blesses whatever it passes. Federalized election rules reshape the electorate, and speech policing silences the critics who might object. Each piece protects the others.This is the oldest playbook of one-party regimes, from the old Bolsheviki to the Venezuelan communists in Caracas: win power once through the ballot box, then rewrite the rules so that you never have to give it back. Whatever individual Democrats sincerely believe, the agenda itself is built so that the party enacting it would never again face a fair fight for control of the national government.That is not saving democracy, as they endlessly preach. It is ending the competitive republic the Constitution created.THE ACCELERANT: A COLOR REVOLUTION IN WAITINGStructural change through Congress takes years. A crisis is faster, and Democrat-adjacent groups and Democrat-aligned activists have spent this year planning for one. The evidence comes from hundreds of recorded calls and thousands of documents that the coordinating platform Renew to Thrive left in a publicly accessible archive, which the researcher Jennica Pounds (@DataRepublican) obtained and has been releasing as "The Democracy Files." Pete Marocco, the Trump appointee who oversaw USAID's shutdown, has publicly vouched for their authenticity.The architects are veterans of USAID's democracy office, the shop that helped engineer the color revolutions in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine. After DOGE closed the agency, they regrouped as the Democracy Renewal Group, keeping the office's initials, and launched Renew American Democracy around four B's: block, bridge, belong, and build. Build is the Point Co-founder Danielle Reiff spoke of leveraging a breakdown into a "refounding moment," called a midterm legitimacy crisis a possible "window of opportunity," and sketched a path from declared red lines to a constitutional convention outside Article V.The blocking is handed to the United Democracy Alliance, a coalition with no website or roster that the recordings link to the Democrat-adjacent organizations No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, and 50501. Organizers credit it to Harvard's Erica Chenoweth, whose "3.5 percent rule" holds that mobilizing that share of a population can topple a government.National Security Leaders for America, comprising some 1,600 retired officers, intelligence officials, and diplomats and led by retired Rear Admiral Michael Smith, runs its Insurrection Act working group and situation room, tracking the alliance's red lines. One participant wrote in a call chat that the network was beginning to consult federal workers on blocking inside agencies during emergencies.If a red line is crossed, Paul Zeitz said, governors "become the kind of lead anchor for political power." An options memo for governors, reportedly shown to California and Illinois, contemplates states withholding resources from federal officials and governors convening a new continental congress of their own.The participants insist their work is nonpartisan, and one said the governors' memo is not a plan for secession. Yet the elected officials they court are Democrats, beginning with Governors Safeguarding Democracy, the forum Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis launched in 2024. Better-funded groups such as PolicyLink speak the same language of a "new founding."The model is one USAID exported abroad: media, lawyers, election monitors, trained activists, and data shops built up in quiet times, then activated together the moment a crisis is declared. Reiff herself warned against moving before conditions ripen.That is not restraint. It is timing, all for the purpose of helping achieve the Democrats' endgame of one-party rule. Either an appropriate "spark" or a simple decision to execute could trigger this catastrophe for the American Republic.CONCLUDING THOUGHTSThere is a constitutional answer for the Democrats' plan. Constitutional conservatives do not need to match the Democrats with a plan of their own. We need only insist on the rules the Framers wrote. If DC deserves statehood, if the Electoral College should go, if justices should serve fixed terms, then Democrats are free to make that case via constitutional amendments or Article V and persuade three-quarters of the states to agree. They know they cannot, and that is exactly why they are trying to go around it. The rest of us, in South Dakota and across the country, should refuse to let them.We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.