Cory Booker Topples Confederate Monument
Five cool things about his daylong-(plus!) filibuster!
Shortly before we posted our piece on Cory Booker’s all-night speech yesterday morning, I said to Yr. Editrix in the Wonkette Sekrit Chat Cave that it might be a good idea to get the article up fairly soon, because Booker’s voice was starting to get raspy and he had finally started seeming maybe a little fatigued. Best to get it posted quickly so everyone could see the end. I am delighted that I was so very wrong.
That was about 15 hours into the speech, and Booker rallied, with the help of the Democratic Senate colleagues who asked him questions. He would do that again and again, for another 10 hours, finally ending his speech a full 25 hours and four minutes after he’d started. He closed the speech as he’d begun it, by invoking the spirit of John Lewis and the need to help your country by getting into good trouble.
It was a remarkable achievement, not only because it set the record for the longest Senate speech since people thought to start using a stopwatch but because Booker took the record away from one of the great stains on American history, Strom “Great Stain on American History” Thurmond, who set the previous record by filibustering against the 1957 Civil Rights Act.
Thurmond, the original Dixiecrat who ran against Harry S Truman in 1948 on that segregationist Southern Dem ticket, set his record with the aim of keeping America racially divided. Booker symbolically drove a stake through the heart of that racist old vampire and his dusty, hateful politics, and he did so with the aim of stopping Thurmond’s ideological heirs from ending democracy, which was always the goal of segregation. So let’s call that Cool Thing Number One in our listicle here.
Last year, Kamala Harris campaigned on the slogan “We’re not going back.” And while he didn’t invoke that slogan yesterday, Cory Booker’s goal was to make damn sure we don’t. After he surpassed Thurmond’s 24-hour, 18-minute record, Booker said, “Maybe my ego got caught up that maybe, maybe, just maybe, I could break this record of the man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand. I’m not here, though, because of his speech; I’m here despite his speech.”
It is a new day, beloveds. This speech is going to be remembered not only for beating an arbitrary time record set by a ghoul from the past, but also, we dare to hope, for kicking the resistance to Donald Trump’s fascist takeover into a new phase. It’s time for all of us, as Booker said at the end of his speech, to step up and do all we can to preserve our country. “The power of the people is greater than the people in power,” he said, and so say we all:
2: Booker Stayed On Target. Other Long Speeches … Not So Much.
Booker faced one obstacle that Strom Thurmond didn’t have in 1957: Thurmond took at least one bathroom break during his marathon speech. Booker somehow went the entire 25 hours and four minutes without leaving the floor, although he was allowed to “yield for a question while still holding the floor,” as he mentioned a few score times.
More importantly, Booker remained focused on the topic of protecting democracy from all the ways Trump and Elon Musk are trying to dismantle it. Other long speeches have resorted to time-wasting tactics like reading long passages from the Constitution, or from the Washington DC phone book, back in those days when doing such a thing wouldn’t result in someone getting killed by a SWAT team. Incidentally, it might be a myth that Thurmond used the phone book tactic; he certainly read from restrictive state laws on voting, but several articles I’ve seen make no mention of the phone book. If you want to read the Congressional Record from 1957, here it is.
Booker also did not read Green Eggs And Ham and completely miss the point, either.
Instead, Booker — wearing a black suit and tie, as if mourning the Republic — hammered again and again at the “grave and urgent” threats that Trump and Elon Musk pose to America: the unconstitutional firings and eliminations of federal agencies that only Congress can shut down, the betrayals of our allies in Europe and Ukraine, the insane threats to actually invade Greenland and Canada, the plan to wreck Joe Biden’s strong economy with tariffs, the attempts to turn back every shred of progress on climate, the weird revenge against law firms that dare to take cases against Trump’s policies. Among many others. No filler, and only a few brief, joking departures into talking about sportsball.
UPDATE: As is so often the case, you filthy fuckaducks in the comments get it far better than I did: The black suit and tie isn’t mourning, it’s a nod to the suits worn by Civil Rights marchers like John Lewis. Dang, for a Doktor of Rhetoric I can be really dense when it comes to semiotics! Hat tip to Alert Wonkette Operative “Babe Paley!”
3. Yes, This Did Delay A Vote
As we said, since Booker’s speech wasn’t part of a formal procedure to block cloture (the vote that’s necessary to end debate and move a bill forward to a vote), it wasn’t technically a filibuster. That said, it ate up nearly a full day of the Senate’s business, shutting down whatever plans Republicans had for the day. Specifically, it delayed until 7 p.m. a vote to confirm that schmuck Matthew “Meatball” Whitaker to be the US ambassador to NATO. Whitaker, who was one of Trump’s thousand or so (acting) attorneys general during his first term, has no experience in foreign policy or military policy, but he did patent a toilet with a deeper bowl so guys who imagine they have large wangdoodles won’t touch the porcelain, so he is in some ways more qualified than other Trump nominees.
Whitaker was confirmed in a 52-45 vote, and here’s where we need to remind Democrats to learn a goddamn thing from Booker: DO EVERYTHING TO SLOW DOWN THE SENATE. After Booker yielded the floor and thanked all the Senate staff and pages who made the speech possible, one or another of the two idiot Republican senators from Idaho — I refuse to tell my home-state senators apart — brought up the vote on Whitaker, which went forward with unanimous consent.
No, no, no. Chuck Schumer! Good for you for encouraging Booker’s speech and helping him with questions during it, but for Chrissakes you need to be blocking unanimous consent on every substantive thing the GOP puts forward. If ever Democrats needed our own Mitch McConnell — or fuck, even our own obnoxious Rand Paul! — someone willing to insist on making the majority work for every last vote, it’s now. Fuck.
4. This Speech Lit A Fire
Or maybe it was always burning since Trump got our stomachs turning. The point is, Democratic voters have been demanding that their electeds DO SOMETHING to stand up to Trump, and Booker absolutely did that. Frank Luntz, the rightwing creep who’ll have “coined the term death tax” in the first line of his obituary, ventured on cable TV that Booker’s speech “may have changed the course of political history,” noting that the marathon speech seemed exactly right for this political moment:
“He struck the kind of tone that grassroots Democrats are looking for. He gave them a reason to fight. He gave them a reason to stand up and say, this is my country too,” Luntz told anchor Leland Vittert.
“Of course, every Republican watching will say, this is nonsense. But he is not speaking just to Republicans, he’s speaking to Americans, and what I saw over the last 25 hours absolutely blew me away,” he added.
I’ve never wanted Frank Luntz to be right on anything as much as this. And as Rachel Maddow noted when she interviewed Booker last night, virtually any livestream of the speech had viewership in the high tens of thousands, especially as Booker came closer to the record. People are inspired, and now the challenge will be to turn that into further action.
5. Oh, We Need One More? Here’s Rachel Maddow’s Debrief Of A Very Tired Senator
Hell, enjoy that interview, where Maddow encourages Booker to hydrate and Booker encourages Maddow to keep beginning her A block every night with video of the protests against fascism that are happening EVERY DAMN DAY in this wonderful country.
And for Crom’s sake, let’s all go to our local “Hands Off” mass mobilization events on Saturday!
[Politico / ABC News / TPM / Politico / The Hill]
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Updated with a note on Booker's suit being more a tribute to male Civil Rights marchers than mourning. Of course! And I call myself a doktor of Rhetoric!
Wonkette regrets the semio-tic.
All you people sparring in the comments, he’s *my* sexxxxy boyfriend, folks. That dark suit nails it.