Cory Booker condemns Trump’s policies in longest Senate speech on record

Sen. Cory Booker, his voice still booming after more than a day spent on the Senate floor railing against the Trump administration, surpassed Strom Thurmond for the longest Senate speech on record Tuesday night, in an act of astonishing stamina that he framed as a call to action.

Booker, D-N.J., a one-time presidential candidate, began his speech at 7 p.m. Monday, vowing to speak as long as he was “physically able.” In a show of physical and oratorical endurance, he lasted past sunset Tuesday, assailing President Donald Trump’s cuts to government agencies and crackdown on immigration.

He ended his speech at 8:05 p.m., 46 minutes after eclipsing Thurmond’s 24-hour, 18-minute filibuster of a civil rights bill in 1957, by quoting former Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights hero. 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 Booker passed Thurmond. For a moment, 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,” 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., Booker passed Sen. Ted Cruz’s memorable 21-hour, 19-minute harangue of President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2013. As the hours dragged on Tuesday and 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, 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,” 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, 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 Thurmond’s had been the longest recorded.

Booker, who for weeks had contemplated delivering a marathon floor speech, had long been bothered that Thurmond, a segregationist from South Carolina, held the record, according to Booker’s office. Thurmond had sustained himself by sipping orange juice and munching on bits of beef and pumpernickel; it was not clear if Booker had eaten anything Tuesday, but two glasses of water rested on a desk in front of his lectern.

Unlike Thurmond’s speech, 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 Trump’s tariffs on Canada.

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 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.

Booker repeatedly drew on American history, comparing the moment facing the United States under Trump to the Civil Rights Movement and the fight for women’s suffrage.

He quoted from speeches by Lewis and John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona who broke with his party to defend Obamacare in 2017. At one point, 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,” 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 Booker’s speech. A spokesperson for the president, Harrison Fields, said 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?” Fields said in a statement.

But in the U.S. Capitol, Booker was cheered on by his colleagues and staff. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, told 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,” 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 — 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, 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,” Booker said Tuesday afternoon. “This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment. Where do you stand?”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.