Standing for our Nation for 25 hours 

Amanda Baucher ’25

Copy Editor

At 7:00 PM, on Monday March 31, Senator Cory Booker rose to speak to the Senate. He would only yield the floor on April 1 around 8:00 PM. Booker began with a quote from John Lewis to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble, help redeem the soul of America.” He explained to the Senate that he rose with the intention of getting into “some good trouble himself.” That good trouble would culminate in a twenty-five hour long speech.

Booker was born and raised in northern New Jersey. He received his undergraduate, and master’s degrees from Stanford University. Afterwards, he studied at the University of Oxford, then graduated from Yale Law school. He first entered politics when elected as mayor of Newark in 2006, then was the first African American elected to represent New Jersey in the Senate in 2013. 

Booker rose to speak in a simple black suit and an American pin on his lapel. The focus, however, was set on what would become the longest speech in Senate history. The rules of a Senate speech are simple: bathroom breaks are prohibited and they must remain standing.. Booker did just that.

A video released by Booker’s youtube account showed the first fifteen minutes of the very long speech, where he stated that he rose “with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as [he was] physically able.” 

He then went on to say in the same video that, “In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the core foundations of our democracy, and even our aspirations as a people… These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such.”

Over the duration of 25 hours and four minutes, Booker discussed a number of topics, even stemming beyond politics. At times, he would speak of his ancestry and being the descendant of both slaves and slave-owners, discussed sports, took questions from his colleagues and even recited poetry. However, he never strayed too far from his primary message— the dangers in our current democracy and the struggles of many Americans with topics that ranged from immigration, healthcare, climate change, and voting rights.

Booker’s website reported that he went through 1164 pages of pre prepared material, and shared more than 200 stories that highlighted the struggles of Americans in recent months. All of this was more than a speech, it was a protest, held right in the United States Senate, against the current presidential administration of Donald Trump.

Booker also highlighted his awareness that the previous record holder for the longest speech was the Republican Senator of South Carolina, a segregationist who spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes against the Civil Rights Act. The fact that the record set by a segregationist was broken by the first African American senator from New Jersey was not lost on his colleagues, who rose to give him a standing ovation once Booker had broken the record.