US Senator Cory Booker just spoke for 25 hours in Congress. What was he trying to achieve?

The Democrats have been under intense pressure to find an effective way to challenge US President Donald Trump without control of either chamber of Congress or a de facto opposition leader^[1].

They may have just found one. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker took the Senate floor on Monday evening in Washington to give a speech^[2] lambasting Trump’s actions. He didn’t stop talking – aside for the occasional question from a fellow Democrat – until Tuesday night, 25 hours later.

So, how common are these types of speeches in the US Congress, and what’s the point?

Filibusters throughout history

Booker’s speech set a new record for the longest continuous speech^[3] in the Senate, surpassing Senator Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour speech in 1957 to try to prevent the passage^[4] of the Civil Rights Act.

This was during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during the second world war. The army was the great desegregation force in the 1940s, and Eisenhower, as president in the 1950s, was strongly in favour of civil rights.

In 1957, Congress was going to pass a civil rights bill that would make it harder for officials in southern states, in particular, to prevent Black people from voting. So Thurmond, the South Carolina senator and fierce proponent of segregation, launched what was (until today) the longest speech in Senate history to oppose it.

Thurmond’s speech was a filibuster, an extended speech^[5] in the Senate to attempt to delay or block a vote on a bill or confirmation. Thurmond, however, was unable to stop enactment of the bill.

Senators engage in filibusters when they know they’re going to lose, especially when it’s a piece of legislation they really dislike or disagree with. Because they can’t stop the passage of the bill, they use the filibuster to call attention to their opposition to it. The intention is to rally the troops and say, “I’m standing with you, even if this vote goes the other way”.

In 2016, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who represents the state of Connecticut where the deadly shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School took place, launched a nearly 15-hour filibuster^[6] to force the Republican Senate leadership to allow votes on two gun control measures.

Republican Senator Ted Cruz also spoke all night^[7] – 21 hours in total – against Obamacare in 2013. It wasn’t all focused on health policy; he filled the time by reading the children’s book, Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss^[8].

What Booker was trying to achieve

Booker’s speech was not technically a filibuster – he wasn’t holding the floor to talk against a specific bill, as Thurmond was. He was giving time to his Democratic colleagues to just control the shape of the general debate about Trump.

Senators use speeches like this when they’re losing on a issue, and Booker feels the Democrats are currently losing to Trump. They have been unable to stop any of his executive actions, so they feel they need to cut through in some way to reach the American people.

Trump has been “flooding the zone” from the moment he took office in January with hundreds of policies and executive actions – and he has been extremely successful at it. These actions cut across so many areas, it’s been very hard for the Democrats, on any given day, to pick out the top things to fight against.

Because they don’t have control of the House or Senate, and there is no opposition leader, there is no single, principal Democrat who can stand up day by day and say, “This is what happened, this was what the threat to the country is, this why we’re opposing it and this is the way we’re going to attack it”.

Trump is controlling the narrative and the media environment. And the Democratic leadership has been unable to counter it, even though, at the grassroots level, Democrats and many others who voted for Trump are really angry.

As Booker put it during his speech:

Moments like this require us to be more creative or more imaginative, or just more persistent and dogged and determined.

There comes a certain point in a human drama that transcends partisanship when you’re looking at someone speaking from the heart, speaking their convictions and you can come to respect them.

Booker ran for the presidency in 2020 and ultimately yielded to Joe Biden, and I expect we’ll hear much more from him in 2028 when the next presidential election occurs. He is most likely going to run again.

References

1. ^{^} de facto opposition leader (theconversation.com)
2. ^{^} give a speech (apnews.com)
3. ^{^} longest continuous speech (apnews.com)
4. ^{^} prevent the passage (www.wnycstudios.org)
5. ^{^} extended speech (www.brennancenter.org)
6. ^{^} nearly 15-hour filibuster (www.nytimes.com)
7. ^{^} spoke all night (www.theguardian.com)
8. ^{^} Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss (www.bbc.com)