New Jersey senator Cory Booker broke an almost 70-year-old file Tuesday with a marathon speech on the Senate flooring criticizing Trump administration insurance policies, which he spent days getting ready for.
“I didn’t know how long I could go. I’m so grateful I lasted for 25 hours [and four minutes],” Booker advised reporters after leaving the ground.
Booker ignored a query about whether or not he wore a catheter or a diaper, or had any help to keep away from utilizing the toilet. As an alternative he described his pre-speech routine, which together with beginning to quick on Friday, avoiding fluids after Sunday evening and studying greater than 1,100 pages of analysis.
“I fasted for days into it. I stopped drinking water a long time ago. I think that had good and bad benefits. I definitely started cramping up from lack of water,” he stated. “So there’s just a lot of tactics I was using to try to make sure that I could stand for that long.
“I really spent time dehydrating myself beforehand so I did not have to go to the bathroom,” he stated.
Through the speech, he often sipped from glasses of water on his desk — which he hovered round all through — and didn’t sit down.
US Senator Cory Booker speaks to the press on the US Capitol in Washington, DC on April 1, 2025. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP by way of Getty Photos)
Because the hours ticked away, Booker drew tens of millions of views on social media.
The speech broke a earlier file set by Sen. Strom Thurmond, who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 for twenty-four hours and 18 minutes.
“To be candid, Strom Thurmond’s record always kind of just really irked me — that he would be the longest speech, that the longest speech on our great Senate floor was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate,” Booker advised Rachel Maddow later Tuesday.
“So to surpass that was something I didn’t know if we could do, but it was something that was really, once we got closer, became more and more important to me.”
