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‘These are not normal times,’ Sen. Cory Booker says in marathon Senate speech • Daily Montanan [1]
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Date: 2025-04-01
U.S. Sen. Cory Booker on Tuesday evening neared the 24-hour mark of a marathon speech on the Senate floor that began Monday night, remarks he said are intended to protest President Donald Trump’s policies on the nation’s budget, immigration, poverty and more.
“These are not normal times in our nation, and they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate,” said Booker, 55. “The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent, and we all must do more to stand against them.”
Booker, a Democrat first elected to the Senate in 2013, on Monday said he’d continue speaking as long as he is “physically able.” After his speech surpassed 20 hours, he looked exhausted, joked about his shirt being “ripe,” and took occasional breaks by yielding the floor for questions from his Democratic colleagues, who praised the former college football player for his endurance.
His speech comes as the Democratic Party faces criticism from voters who say the party’s leaders are not doing enough to stand up to Trump’s actions, especially those that experts say fly in the face of legal precedent.
“This is not right or left. It is right or wrong. This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment,” Booker said early Tuesday afternoon. “Where do you stand?”
Booker’s speech is one of the longest ever given on the Senate floor. The record is held by Strom Thurmond, a South Carolina Republican who held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes in 1957 in protest of the Civil Rights Act. As of 4:30 p.m. — 21 hours and 30 minutes after Booker started speaking — his speech became the fourth longest ever heard in the Senate.
Booker will beat Thurmond’s record if he’s still speaking at 7:19 p.m. Tuesday.
The senator has covered a breadth of topics: health care, Social Security, Medicaid, grocery prices, free speech, veterans, public education, world leaders, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, and national security concerns. He read letters and comments from constituents and he quoted speeches from the late Rep. John Lewis — invoking Lewis’ famous call to action to “get in good trouble” — and the late Sen. John McCain.
Booker, a former mayor of Newark, also assailed Trump’s policies on immigration. He said the Trump administration is doing “outrageous things like disappearing people off of American streets, violating fundamental principles of this document” — here he held up a copy of the U.S. Constitution — “invoking the Alien Enemies Act from the 1700s that was last used to put Japanese Americans into internment camps.”
“Do we see what’s happening?” Booker asked.
He spent about a half-hour reading the account of Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian citizen who was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for 12 days in March. He also noted that the Trump administration conceded Monday that it deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Maryland man with protected legal status, to an El Salvador prison because of an “administrative error.”
“The government can’t walk up to a human being and grab them off the street and put them on a plane and send them to one of the most notorious prisons in the world, and just say, as one of our authorities did, ‘Oopsie,’” Booker said.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, who asked about the impact of potential Medicaid cuts and tariffs about 15 hours into Booker’s speech, told Booker he has the support of the entire party.
“Your strength, your fortitude, your clarity has just been nothing short of amazing. All of America is paying attention to what you’re saying. All of America needs to know there’s so many problems — the disastrous actions of this administration in terms of how they’re helping only the billionaires and hurting average families — you have brought this forth with such clarity,” he said.
This story was first published by the New Jersey Monitor which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network, including the Daily Montanan, supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
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