Senator Cory Booker has been speaking on the Senate floor for 12 hours to obstruct proceedings while staying within the governing body’s rules in protest of the actions of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Booker has been speaking since 7 p.m. ET on Monday evening to “disrupt” the Senate because “our nation is in crisis.” He said he would keep going “as long as I am physically able.”
The speech is not classed as a filibuster as he is not blocking a nomination or legislation, and lawmakers finished voting on Monday before he started speaking.
“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,” Booker said.
“These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”
His speech comes as Democratic leaders are facing mounting pressure to stand up to Trump.
Several senators have delivered marathon speeches in the chamber in recent years, including on gun control, National Security Agency surveillance programs, and the Affordable Care Act.
Potential cuts to Medicaid by congressional Republicans were prominent among the topics Booker, the former mayor of Newark, touched upon.
Booker detailed the harm that it would cause Americans across the country, including his own constituents.
Republicans have insisted that their legislative agenda will focus on fraud, waste, and abuse and not Medicaid, but they have not specified which programs exactly spending cuts will come from.
“It is maddening in this country to create greater and greater health care crisis and for us not to solve it but to battle back and forth between trying to make incremental changes or to tear it all down with no plan to make it better, leaving more Americans suffering,” Booker said.
The senator also invoked the late GOP Sen. John McCain and his pivotal health care vote in 2017: “Senator McCain, I know you wouldn’t sanction this; I know you would be screaming.”
Booker took questions from his colleagues as he spoke, giving him brief breaks without losing the floor, as per senate procedure.
The record for the longest speech is the late Strom Thurmond’s 24 hours and 18 minutes of speech opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1957.
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