Senator Cory Booker told the American people of the disaster that is Donald Trump. He did that for over 25 hours.
Senator Cory Booker talks with Rachel Maddow about holding the Senate floor for a record-breaking 25 hours and 4 minutes to raise attention to the perils of Donald Trump's agenda and inspire American activism against that agenda as many of his constituents have taken to regular public protests on their own.
Senator Cory Booker, his voice still booming after more than a day spent on the Senate floor railing against the Trump administration, on Tuesday night surpassed Strom Thurmond for the longest Senate speech on record, in an act of astonishing stamina that he framed as a call to action.
Mr. Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and one-time presidential candidate, began his speech at 7 p.m. on Monday, vowing to speak as long as he was “physically able.” In a show of physical and oratorical endurance, he lasted past sunset on Tuesday, assailing President Trump’s cuts to government agencies and crackdown on immigration.
He ended his speech at 8:05 p.m., 46 minutes after eclipsing Mr. Thurmond’s 24-hour 18-minute filibuster of a civil rights bill in 1957. He finished by quoting John Lewis, the civil rights hero and congressman. Mr. Booker said of Lewis: “He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream. Let’s be bold in America.”
Earlier, cheers broke out in the chamber when Mr. Booker passed Mr. Thurmond. For a moment, Mr. Booker addressed the man he had eclipsed.
“To hate him is wrong, and maybe my ego got too caught up that if I stood here, maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand,” Mr. Booker said. “I’m not here though because of his speech. I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”
Earlier, at 4:20 p.m., Mr. Booker passed Senator Ted Cruz’s memorable 21-hour-and-19-minute harangue of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2013. As the hours dragged on Tuesday and Mr. Booker kept speaking, tens of thousands followed along on livestreams, curious to see how long he might go.
Without bathroom breaks but with occasional pauses for encouraging questions from his fellow Democrats, Mr. Booker read from a binder of notes and waved a small copy of the U.S. Constitution. He gesticulated and roared. At times, he draped himself over his lectern.
His voice grew hoarse. But it remained strong.
He said the United States had reached a “moral moment” that required a stand against the Trump administration, which he said had brought the United States to a moment of “crisis” barely two months after the president returned to office.
“My voice is inadequate,” Mr. Booker said more than 19 hours into the speech. “My efforts today are inadequate to stop what they’re trying to do. But we the people are powerful.”
More than 67 years earlier, Mr. Thurmond set a record with a 24-hour-and-18-minute effort to block the passage of a civil rights bill. The Senate’s log of longest speeches does not reach back to the founding of the nation, but Mr. Thurmond’s is the longest recorded.
Mr. Booker, who for weeks had contemplated delivering a marathon floor speech, had long been bothered that Mr. Thurmond, a segregationist from South Carolina, held the record, according to Mr. Booker’s office. Mr. Thurmond had sustained himself by sipping orange juice and munching on bits of beef and pumpernickel; it was not clear if Mr. Booker had eaten anything on Tuesday, but two glasses of water rested on a desk in front of his lectern.
He had prepared for the speech by fasting for days, he told reporters on Tuesday night after his speech. Before he began on Monday, he had not had food since Friday or water since Sunday night. The approach took its toll, said Mr. Booker, a vegan and former Stanford football player who has chronicled his efforts to stay fit and eat healthy.
“Instead of figuring out how to go to the bathroom,” he said, “I ended up, I think, really unfortunately dehydrating myself.” During the speech, he recalled, he started to “really cramp up.”
Unlike Mr. Thurmond’s speech, Mr. Booker’s was not a filibuster — a procedural tactic that has been used to block legislation on many issues — because it did not come during a debate over a specific bill or nominee. But it did delay a planned vote on a Democratic-led bill to undo Mr. Trump’s tariffs on Canada.
Mr. Booker paused from time to time to take encouraging questions from Democratic colleagues and for a midday prayer by the Senate chaplain. He divided his remarks into sections focused on aspects of the administration’s agenda, focusing on health care, education, immigration and national security.
He assailed what he said were Mr. Trump’s plans to cut funding for Medicaid and other programs. The White House has denied that it plans to cut Medicaid benefits, but the president and his allies have attacked Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security over what they claim is waste, fraud and abuse.
Mr. Booker repeatedly drew on American history, comparing the moment facing the United States under Mr. Trump to the civil rights movement and the fight for women’s suffrage.
He quoted repeatedly from speeches by Lewis, the civil rights hero, and John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona who broke with his party to defend Obamacare in 2017. At one point, Mr. Booker spent some 30 minutes reading an account by a Canadian citizen, Jasmine Mooney, detailing her detention in the United States by immigration enforcement officers.
“We’re senators with all of this power, but in this democracy, the power of people is greater than the people in power,” Mr. Booker said, adding, “The civil rights movement wasn’t just won because of just a few Black folks that stood up.”
He called on a broad coalition of Americans to stand up to the Trump administration.
The White House dismissed Mr. Booker’s speech. A spokesman for the president, Harrison Fields, said Mr. Booker was seeking an “I am Spartacus” moment, referring to a comment by the senator during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh that was mocked at the time as a bid to capture a viral moment.
“When will he realize he’s not Spartacus — he’s a spoof?” Mr. Fields said in a statement.
But in the U.S. Capitol, Mr. Booker was cheered on by his colleagues and staff. Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, told Mr. Booker that he was delivering a “tour de force.”
“It’s not only the amount of time that you have spent on the floor, what strength,” Mr. Schumer said, “but the brilliance of your indictment of this awful administration that is so destroying our democracy, that is taking so much away from working people.”
When fellow Democrats asked their questions — offering interludes more than inquiries — Mr. Booker’s staff members jumped into action. Kleenex, for dabbing sweat from his brow, was replenished. A fresh binder, thick with printed material, was placed on the podium.
Representatives who had crossed the capitol from the House filtered in, drawn by the spectacle. They arrived, lingered, departed. Each bearing witness to the endurance test unfolding.
Throughout his speech, Mr. Booker attempted to frame his case as existing outside of run-of-the-mill Washington debates — as a call to action at a pivotal juncture.
“This is not right or left, it is right or wrong,” Mr. Booker said on Tuesday afternoon. “This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment. Where do you stand?”
Tim Balk, Mike Ives, and Matthew Mpoke Bigg, The New York Times