Cory Booker’s record filibuster was 1st shift on a job that’s far from over | Opinion
He didn’t drink or eat to ensure the gastrointestinal tank was empty before he took the Senate floor. But by depleting himself in the most literal sense of the word, Cory Booker found a strength that Americans haven’t seen from the overwhelming majority of their representatives.
“These are not normal times in our nation,” the New Jersey Democrat said while starting his record-setting 25-hour quasi-filibuster in defiance of a Trump regime that his party struggles to oppose, in protest, procedure or perception. “And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate. The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent, and we all must do more to stand against them.”
All Americans should appreciate that before Booker’s correct warning of a “looming constitutional crisis” — in this case, President Donald Trump’s threats to annex Canada and Greenland. They should appreciate that the last time the floor was occupied this long, it was 1957, and avowed segregationist Strom Thurmond was defending another regime, one that violently enforced separation but never equality. Thurmond fought to preserve a country where people who look like Booker would never touch the ground on which he walked — at least without a mop and broom in hand.
Meanwhile, Trump’s ongoing purge of Black history — the latest threat to Smithsonian museums supposedly pushing “anti-American” values — threatens our ability to contextualize why anyone resisted the America that Thurmond stood for, and that, even still, has remnants that must be crushed.
Booker’s stand was right — more right than any of his Senate colleagues have been in a while. But Booker could stand to be more right.
CORY BOOKER GAINS ATTENTION FOR POSSIBLE PRESIDENTIAL RUN
Because while the senator ridicules and draws needed attention to the ongoing regime and constitutional crisis, which conveniently overlaps with valuable attention the former presidential candidate will need if he runs again, Booker’s already grafted himself into Trump’s story. And not always as the hero.
Alongside all of his Democratic colleagues, Booker joined the unanimous Senate confirmation vote for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who earned his privileged role in the Trump administration by completely reversing his earlier condemnations of the now-President as a “con-artist” and pivoting himself towards total fealty to Trump’s whims. Booker made the same blunder, backing Trump Cabinet appointees three more times. Let the record show Booker wasn’t alone, but isn’t that kind of the problem?
Now, Rubio gleefully enacts a constitutional crisis (that Booker, to his credit, has opposed) by siccing Immigration and Customs Enforcement on civilians resting at home or strolling their neighborhood, stripping people of their constitutionally enshrined right to free speech and due process, even sending Venezuelans to foreign prison camps for tattoos they deem illicit.
Where might we be if Booker, or anyone, disrupted the Senate vote before the regime kicked into high gear? The Democrats may have limited leverage, but every minute of procedural delay is time parents have their children, workers have at their jobs, and freedoms our nation claims to value.
Better late than never — I know. But late got us here, and we hold our electeds accountable not just by praising them when they show up, but by vivid remembrance of when they didn’t.
MARCO RUBIO’S ROLE ON IMMIGRATION, CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS
Rubio hasn’t stopped at accusing Venezuelans he punishes for the unfounded accusation that they are international gang bangers. He has authorized arrests of students for nonviolent advocacy for Palestinians attempting to survive a genocide, using his platform to smear them as terrorists.
Booker, like most American politicians, laid the groundwork elsewhere by pushing legislation that equated and punished nonviolent economic sanctions against Israel — a nation found responsible in international court for apartheid last year — with antisemitic bigotry.
Those 25 hours Booker took the floor represented an alternative vision of what I still believe a majority of Americans would like America to be, one where everyone is treated humanely and vigorously supported in their freedoms. I hope the senator gets a bite to eat, takes a shower and maybe sneaks a leak. For the first time since Trump’s second election, and maybe well before it, Booker’s earned a break.
But if Trump is the existential threat that Booker claims, an aspiring monarch distinctive for dangling the Bill of Rights as a conditional reward for loyalty, then the mess the president is making is widespread. The senator’s role is, in a manner wholly different from and entirely subversive of Thurmond’s vision for men like him, actually that of a janitor. The mess is widespread.
Booker’s job is more than unfinished. We can only hope he’s just started.
This story was originally published April 2, 2025 at 3:30 PM with the headline "Cory Booker’s record filibuster was 1st shift on a job that’s far from over | Opinion."
