Senator Cory Booker’s Record-Breaking Speech

During my high school Model UN years, I attended a conference where I participated in a U.S. Senate committee. In other words, a group of teenagers from schools across the nation gathered in Boston, wearing oversized blazers, to roleplay as Senators for two days. In this particular committee, students were allowed to filibuster (to delay further debate and voting by speaking at length). The majority of us petered out after a few minutes. One of the more loquacious delegates lasted about ten, although his researched points quickly gave way to quotes from Bee Movie. Even this was not a glaring stretch of our plausibility: look to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who in 2013 recited Green Eggs And Ham during a filibuster in opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

Suffice to say, lengthy public speaking is difficult for high schoolers and U.S. Senators alike. Cruz’s filibuster lasted for 21 hours and 19 minutes, and no Senate speech in the following 12 years surpassed it until this past Tuesday, when New Jersey Senator Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and 5 minutes on the Senate floor in protest of President Trump’s administration.

Booker’s speech did not constitute a filibuster, as he did not intend to block a nomination or a bill from passing—he instead wished to disrupt bureaucratic proceedings. “Tonight, I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble,” said Booker (quoting civil rights activist and Representative John Lewis, who famously encouraged Americans to “get in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble”). “I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able.”

Booker proceeded to set a record for the longest speech in Senate history, eclipsing Cruz’s filibuster and overtaking the previous record holder, Senator Strom Thurmond, by 47 minutes. Thurmond was a segregationist from South Carolina who filibustered for 24 hours and 18 minutes to oppose the Civil Rights Act of 1957. This was not a unique use of the filibuster: it has a storied history as a tool used by segregationists aiming to delay the passage of civil rights legislation. Senator John C. Calhoun, a slave-owner from South Carolina, was another employer of the filibuster to thwart civil rights (and is contentiously referred to as its inventor by some historians). It took the Senate until 1964 to end a filibuster—which could only be accomplished by a two-thirds majority at the time—and pass any major civil rights legislation. In his eulogy at Rep. John Lewis’ funeral, Barack Obama referred to the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” and suggested that it should be eliminated in order to secure rights for all Americans.

Nowadays, the filibuster is used mostly by Republican politicians (roughly twice as often as Democrats) to halt the passage of Democratic legislation. It has become rarer to see a filibuster in action on the Senate floor: if a Senator files an intention to filibuster, the bill in question will sometimes not be brought to a vote. The only way to end a filibuster is a cloture motion, which ends debate and requires 60 votes to pass. In recent years, bills such as the American Clean Energy and Security Act have been halted by the probability of a filibuster.

Since he entered the Senate, Booker had been disturbed that Sen. Thurmond held the record, something he expressed to reporters after his feat. Nevertheless, Booker made it clear that he was not there because of Thurmond: "The man who tried to stop the rights upon which I stand…I'm here despite his speech. I'm here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful." For Booker to beat Thurmond’s record, in a format every bit as taxing yet disparate from the racist filibuster the latter Senator employed, is a form of poetic justice.

For young people like myself, hearing Booker allude to the power of the people—a force that has arguably strengthened since Trump took office, and which most recently reared its head during the nationwide “Hands Off!” protests on April 5—was especially heartening. The impact of his speech was felt on platforms like TikTok, where his livestream (on an account he had just created, no less) garnered over 350 million likes and 150,000 viewers toward the end. Booker’s speech was, naturally, broad-reaching; he covered topics ranging from Social Security and Medicare to the housing crisis to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Booker also touched on many topics close to the hearts of young people, including the Education Department, the environment, the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities with DEI programs, and the failings of the Democratic party.

At around 3 a.m., Booker began speaking about the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Department of Education. “If we are to be the nation Andy Kim talked about, where every generation has the right to expect that the next generation will do better, not worse,” said Booker, referencing Senator Andrew Kim, “so much of this revolves around how important education is to a democracy. The administration wants to dismantle, defund, destroy the Department of Education and scatter responsibilities across agencies that themselves are going through massive personnel cuts, and are not equipped to handle them. This is ultimately about whether or not we as a nation believe every child deserves an education, and we should organize ourselves to meet that calling.”

At around hour 17, Booker addressed Trump’s environmental policy rollbacks: “Donald Trump is rolling back common-sense environmental protections, threatening our children’s future and hurting our nation’s economy. Energy costs in America are continuing to rise, making it harder and harder to pay bills. This administration is canceling projects that would create more jobs for Americans and lower energy prices…President Trump promised America the cleanest air and cleanest water. Upon entering office, he instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to cut a long list of common sense environmental protections.”

After addressing how crucial government funding is to research institutions and the broader scientific community, Booker expressed his disapproval of the Trump administration’s crackdown on DEI programs and punishment of international students involved in campus protests for Palestine. “The other assault on the universities is a strange new attack on free speech. It began from a principled critique that bureaucracies, universities, and elites all became too ‘woke.’ But the government response to this problem has been Orwellian—searching through these institutions for any mentions of the words ‘diversity,’ or ‘identity,’ or ‘inclusion,’ and then shutting down those programs without any review. Worse: it now punishes people who might espouse certain views on topics like Israel and Palestine, and is now punishing the protesters themselves.”

Towards the latter half of his marathon speech, Booker acknowledged his party’s own culpability in the far-right’s rise to power: “I confess that I’ve been inadequate. That the Democrats have been responsible for allowing the rise of this demagogue.”

Booker received a lengthy standing ovation when he finally yielded the floor after over 25 hours of speaking. He ended his speech by quoting Rep. Lewis once again, urging the American people to commit themselves to causing “good trouble.”

If one thing can be taken away from Sen. Booker’s speech, it’s his belief in the power and necessity of public protest and opposition. While addressing a question from Senator Amy Klobuchar, Booker reflected on the movements he had personally witnessed during his time as a politician, and how historically, true change—from women’s suffrage to LGBTQ rights—was fostered outside Senate walls. “We’ve seen the fights while we’ve been here, some of the most painful moments where we’ve seen the arc of the moral universe bent. Not by the people here. Not by the people in this body. It happened because the power of the people is greater than the people in power.”