April 1st, 2025. Today, Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, made history. For more than 25 hours, he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or

children's literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent,

powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is

destroying our democracy. On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported

that members of Donald Trump's National Security Council, including National Security Advisor

Mike Walz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using

Gmail accounts to conduct government business.

And the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services

gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the CDC,

the National Institutes of Health, or the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration, or the FDA.

Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.

Booker began his marathon speech at 7 o'clock on the evening of March 31st, with little fanfare.

In a video, recorded before he began, he said that he had been hearing from people all over

my state, and indeed all over the nation, calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things

that recognize the urgency, the crisis of the moment.

And so we all have a responsibility, I believe, to do something different, to cause, as John

Lewis said, good trouble. And that includes me.

On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia,

who had been one of the original freedom riders challenging racial segregation

in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in

Selma, Alabama in 1965, as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their

voting rights be protected.

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