On Monday, March 31, Democratic New Jersey Senator Cory Booker began to make history. At 7 p.m. EST, Booker stood to address the United States Senate. He would not stop standing for twenty-five hours and five minutes, finally concluding his marathon speech at 8:05 p.m. on April 1. Booker’s record-setting address began and ended by invoking the late John Lewis’ call to get in “good trouble, necessary trouble” to “help redeem the soul of America.” The trouble Booker opted to get into was the trouble of protest: For more than a day, he unleashed searing indictments upon the Trump administration.
The previous record holder for the longest Senate speech was segregationist South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who was a Democrat before the party’s midcentury ideological shift. Thurmond’s twenty-four hour and eighteen-minute filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 sought to delay the passage of legislation centered on the protection of African American voting rights. Booker recognized the significance of himself, who was standing in protest of the same racist and reactionary neglect of American citizens practiced faithfully by Thurmond, being the one to take his record. “I’m not here…because of his speech,” said Booker. “I’m here despite his speech.”
Booker’s speech, which accused the second Trump administration of all manner of offenses, frequently returned to the topic of the human cost of the President’s policies. The speech cited reports and statistics heavily in its overarching assertion that the administration is doing grievous harm to the American people. For Booker, this is the case regardless of the political lens through which you view the state of the union. On thirteen separate occasions during his speech, Booker explains that “this is not right or left, it is right or wrong.” In other words, this isn’t about political parties—it’s about morals.
This, and only this, is the correct way to view the issues plaguing America and the world today. The United States are in a state of moral, not political, crisis. I will grant that politics has played a massive role in eroding our collective goodwill and sense of common humanity. Political rhetoric and media are working overtime to deepen our sociocultural divide. But only a morally bankrupt culture would continue clinging to the glittering promises of politics while terror and hatred threaten to reign supreme. There is no political discussion or revelation to be had with an agent of chaos—he speaks only the languages of power and control.
Of course, Booker’s thirteen-times-reiterated point was lost on the virulently conservative crowd, as so many things are. “Who knew all it would take to become the new de facto leader of the failing Democrat Party would be yapping aimlessly for twenty-five hours on the Senate floor,” said Fox News’ Tomi Lahren before mocking congressional Democrats for “fawning over” Booker’s feat. Despite Booker’s full day’s worth of arguments asserting that we’d be remiss, even foolish, to politicize the basic immorality of the President’s actions, Lahren can only assess his speech through a partisan lens. If this doesn’t demonstrate the ease with which the political corrupts the moral, I don’t know what will.
Featured image courtesy of Senate Television via AP.