From Monday evening nonstop into Tuesday evening, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker demonstrated both impressive physical stamina and admirable political clarity in giving a record-breaking 25-hour, 6-minute speech on the Senate floor, in which the 55-year-old legislator excoriated the Trump administration for its authoritarian impulses and federal slash-and-burn.
Even just to wipe segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond (then a Democrat) from that one particular prior record — which he set in 1957 during a 24-hour, 18-minute speech as part of a marathon series of filibusters in opposition to the Civil Rights Act — the effort was worth it. But it was also a unifying event among what’s often felt like a fragmented liberal response to the lightning assault on our democratic institutions.
As much as Booker’s been celebrated for the feat among his own party, some have criticized him on the grounds that this was not technically a filibuster in opposition to anything in particular, and simply delayed the regular course of business in the Senate. Immediately after the conclusion of the speech, the Senate moved to confirm erstwhile former Trump first-term Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker as ambassador to NATO.
Booker’s lengthy speech was, ultimately, performance. To those that denigrate that, we ask: what aspect of politics is not, to some extent, performance? What politician or political movement or resistance to authoritarianism has been devoid of some element of performance?
Donald Trump himself has wielded performance as heavily as any American political figure in the nation’s history, to great effect. While we certainly agree that theater without action is not going to move the needle, political energy is a precursor to concrete action. It also shows that, while Democrats do not have a majority in either house of Congress and are therefore often relegated to simply watching as their GOP colleagues voluntarily abdicate their power as a co-equal branch, that doesn’t mean they have to sit idly by and do nothing about it.
Beyond the length of Booker’s speech, the content was important; he was not merely filling time to fill time, but putting on the record a sobering analysis of Trump and Elon Musk’s antidemocratic power grab and the ways in which their wrecking ball approach to government is hurting real people — taking benefits away from veterans and people with disabilities, axing crucial research and foreign aid that also represented the tip of the spear for U.S. global soft power, cutting away the due process protections that safeguard all of us and so on.
In using the stunt format to draw in new eyeballs — at least some 350,000 people tuned into the various YouTube livestreams, in addition to the others that watched on television and on other social media, certainly many more people than typically watch a Senate floor speech on C-SPAN2 — Booker could lay this all out to an audience that might not, in our frequent political complacency, be hearing it.
Other Democrats perhaps could take some notes on how to break through the noise and sound the proper alarm about this emergency. It won’t be enough, and they must use all other available tools to stop the full takeover that Trump and his MAGA movement clearly want, but it can shore up the popular support that makes that resistance much more effective.
