Big Filibuster Day
AP photo
Cory Booker once dreamed of playing pro football, and it showed this week, in the sheer athleticism of his speech on the floor of the US Senate.
Technically, the New Jersey Democrat’s 25-hour-long stemwinder wasn’t a “filibuster” – that term usually implies gassing on in the Senate in order to delay or defeat the passage of a piece of legislation. But it was a show of unbelievable stamina. No breaks for rest, food, or even to pee. A team of staffers had beavered for a week to prepare the speech. The transcript stretched for 1164 pages – about the length of War and Peace.
Booker’s cri de coeur [cri de vessie?] was in protest of a voting-rights bill that would restrict voting access in certain states. But what it really was a call for swift and unified pushback to Trumpian overreach – across class, age and party lines.
Here are three ways to frame this history-making* event:
ONE: Desperate times call for desperate measures
In the age of sound bites it takes a radical act to get noticed. New School is quick pulses that are promptly lost in the news-cycle churn. This called for old-school tactics: marathon oratory – a move as old as, well, the marathon. But Booker is no Luddite; he maintains an active Tik Tok account, and this speech streamed onto it live. As word spread about what was going down, people found it. By the end, he’d hit 350 million ‘like’s.
TWO: Shoot your shot
Senate rules say that when you stand up to speak you get one chance. This is your constitutionally protected “right to recognition.” Nobody can tell you when you have to stop. But once you’re done you’re done. As Booker went on and on, and his voice began to go, what came through was … urgency. A Sword of Damocles hung over the whole proceeding. Once he yielded the floor there’d be no getting it back. Everything about the speech said: Folks, this is it. There is no tomorrow.
THREE: It’s still just talk, and talk is cheap
That’s how some of Booker’s opponents (and even supposed allies!) are casting it. After he was roasted for accepting a dinner invitation from President Trump – Why on earth would you talk to that guy, you’re just legitimizing him! – the talk-show host Bill Maher fired back. “Don’t talk as opposed to what? Writing the same editorial for the millionth time? Making 25-hour speeches into the wind? Really, that’s what liberals have?”
To my mind, nothing you do for 25 hours straight is cheap. A sound bite is cheap. This was the opposite of a sound bite. It was a real attempt to seize the moment – stretch it, command it, electrify it – the better to rouse folks out of their complacent slumber … before it’s too late.
* Booker’s speech is the longest Senate speech ever. It eclipsed Strom Thurmond’s 24-hour filibuster to block a civil rights bill in 1957 … and set a new bar for a senatorial Big Day.
