Booker, a Democratic senator for New Jersey, entered the annals of history on Tuesday after holding the Senate floor for more than 25 hours, shattering the previous record set by the late segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond.
With only occasional pauses to take questions from fellow senators, Booker held forth for 25 and 4 minutes, 46 minutes longer than Thurmond’s 1957 filibuster against the Civil Rights Act.
Booker, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2020, began his speech on Monday evening by invoking late civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis’s call for Americans to get in “good trouble, necessary trouble”.
“What has happened in the last 71 days is a patent demonstration of a time where John Lewis’s call to everyone has, I think, become more urgent and more pressing,” said Booker, a former mayor of Newark who was first elected to the Senate in 2013.
During his speech, Booker accused the Trump administration of “recklessly” attacking institutions and railed against Trump aid Elon Musk’s cuts to the federal bureaucracy, including reductions in staffing at the Social Security Administration, Al Jazeera reported.
As he wrapped up his speech on Tuesday evening, Booker returned to Lewis’s history of civil rights activism.
“He said he had to do something, he would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual,” Booker said.