The Daily Reid: Cory Booker and winning by leading
By breaking a segregationist's filibuster record, Senator Cory Booker stepped into Chuck Schumer's moral vacuum to become the moral leader of the opposition
Cory Booker almost wasn’t from New Jersey.
Here’s the story he has previously shared in interviews and on Facebook, on the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act:
In 1969, one year after the passage of the Fair Housing Act guaranteeing equal access to housing for all Americans regardless of race, religion, or national origin, there was a couple in Washington, D.C., married with 2 boys, who decided to move to New Jersey. While searching for homes, they encountered a practice called “real estate steering” where black couples were steered away from certain neighborhoods. The couple grew frustrated realizing they were being led away from white neighborhoods; so they sought the help of the Fair Housing Council, which set up an elaborate sting operation where this black couple would look at a house, be told it wasn't for sale, and then a white couple would follow and find out that the house was, in fact, still on the market.⠀
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Eventually this couple found a house in a small NJ town that they loved, but were told that the house wasn't for sale. They arranged for a white couple to follow them and—lo and behold—the house was, in fact, still for sale. The white couple put a bid on the house, and on the day of the closing, instead of the white couple showing up, the gentleman from the black couple appeared with a volunteer lawyer. The real estate agent became so angry that he punched the lawyer and sicced a dog on the man. Yet the law was on their side. The Fair Housing Act gave this man and his family rights that were not there just one year prior—and eventually the black couple and their two kids moved into that home in NJ. ⠀
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That was 1969, the year I was born, and that couple was my parents, Carolyn & Cary Booker. That’s my origin story—this legislation empowered my family to move into the home of their dreams in an all-white neighborhood with incredibly good schools and a great community that gave me my foundation to continue to great colleges and one day serve as a U.S. Senator. ⠀
The Senator shared that story again during his marathon 25 hour speech, which began at around 7:20 p.m. Eastern Time on March 31st, and ended shortly before 8 p.m. on April 1st, making it the longest filibuster in the history of the U.S. Senate. Significantly, the record was previously held by Strom Thurmond, who held the Senate floor from 8:54 PM on August 28, 1957 to 9:12 PM August 29, 1957, delivering an exhausting and seemingly endless diatribe to protest the introduction of the Civil Rights Act that would ultimately create the civil rights division of the Justice Department.
"I am convinced that this is bad proposed legislation, which never should have been introduced, and which never should have been approved by the Senate,” Thurmond squeaked from the Senate rostrum. “I urge every member of this body to consider this bill most carefully. I hope the Senate will see fit to kill it."
Here’s more on ole’ Strom, from The Takeaway…
At precisely 8:54 PM on August 28, 1957, Senator Strom Thurmond began the longest continuous filibuster in U.S. history. A final stand against a tide of history that was overwhelming the forces of racism and white supremacy that dominated the South and Southern lawmakers in the U.S. Congress.
But almost a decade before Thurmond's filibuster, Southern state separatist leaders had revolted in opposition to President Harry Truman's civil rights platform in 1948. Democrats dubbed themselves “Dixiecrats” and spoke about taking back their country that was being turned into an unrecognizable dictatorship.
Then the governor of South Carolina, Strom Thurmond spoke at the Dixiecrat Convention of ‘48 like a member of the Republican faction we would call the Tea Party today.
“[The Civil Rights Act] simply means that it's another means, that it's another effort on the part of this president to dominate the country by force and to put into effect these uncalled for and the damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called ‘civil rights.’ And I tell you, the American people, from one side to the other, had better wake up and oppose such a program, and if they don't the next thing will be a totalitarian state in these United States.”
… “There's not enough troops in the army, to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches,” Thurmond said. [Emphasis added]
Is this an awkward time to mention that this same man secretly fathered a biracial daughter with a 16 year old Black girl who worked as a maid in his family’s home when he was 22 and that she eventually spoke out about it? Ok I digress… or that Strom was biologically linked with Rev. Al Sharpton due to Thurmond’s slave-holding ancestor owning a Sharpton ancestor? Ok stop me before I go into another wormhole!
Senator Booker has said that Thurmond’s racist, 24-hour, 1957 filibuster stuck in his mind for a long time, before he decided to break that record with a nightlong cry for justice. He said he had hoped Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, who has been aggressively challenging the perception of Democratic weakness by routinely using his voice to call out the Trump-Elon regime for its blatant injustices, would be the one to do it. But in the end, the task of supplanting the South Carolina Dixiecrat’s record fell to him.
And Cory Booker rose to the occasion. He followed all of the old time filibuster rules despite there being no legislation on the table: no bathroom breaks, no leaving the floor for any reason, and only ceasing to speak to take questions from other Senators. Here’s a good summary of the night from the Associated Press:
And with a final call out to John Lewis, Senator Booker yielded the floor…
Booker’s speech, unlike the Democrats’ previous “hold the floor” overnight protest that temporarily halted a vote on a Trump nominee (last night’s delayed the vote on Trump’s NATO envoy), was far from fruitless. Not only did Senator Booker spend the entire night speaking truth to the power of a would-be king, he led other members to join him. One by one, Democratic Senators, asked Booker to temporarily cede the floor for questions. Even Chuck Schumer, the nominal leader of the Senate minority, had to ask Booker for time to speak. Senator Booker took questions and engaged with Senators including Senator Murphy, who has been whispered about as a potential replacement for Chuck Schumer, and Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, perhaps the right wing Leonard Leo-stacked Supreme Court’s greatest nemesis, and Nevada Senator Catherine Cortez Masto, who spoke movingly of the poor and the elderly in her state and their fears about the slashing of federal aid. But he never yielded the floor. On that night HE, and not Schumer, was the functional, practical, and moral leader of the Senate opposition.
During his speech, Senator Booker read letters from people impacted by the mass firings of federal workers, skyrocketing consumer prices under Trump’s price-hiking tariffs, and the abuse of federal agencies by the doge gang. He told the stories of people who are fearful of losing their Social Security and Medicaid. He spoke up for immigrants and decried the arrest and deportation of frightened students by masked men and women who drag lawful visa holders into unmarked vans and ship them off to far-away states or notorious international prisons. In righteous terms, repeatedly calling on the spirit and memory of John Lewis and the “good trouble” he urged all people of conscience to get into, and sometimes with a cracking voice and looking as dehydrated and exhausted as he apparently was, Senator Booker condemned Elon Musk and Donald Trump for the inhumanity with which they are governing this country. Other Democrats have done all of those things. But they have lacked cohesion and coordination, until last night. Last night they were led. And not by their nominal leader. In every respect, as of today — if he wants it — Cory Booker is the leader of the Democratic Senate opposition.
The major networks failed, in my opinion, to cover the marathon speech in the moment, but Booker supplanting Thurmond’s record has drawn heavy coverage afterward. That alone has spread his message of moral clarity even into the crime and weather-dominated bastions of local news. That alone is a win. Now the question is, what will Senator Booker do with his newfound position as a key moral leader in the party?
That’s what remains to be seen.
Coda: Republican pollster Frank Luntz emerges as a believer:
I watched a lot of it. I listened to words, I listened to phrases, how he presents himself. Did he criticize Donald Trump? Of course he did. But he struck the kind of tone that grassroots Democrats are looking for. He gave them a reason to fight. He gave them a reason to stand up and say this is my country too. Of course, every Republican watching will say this is nonsense, but he’s not speaking just to Republicans, he’s speaking to Americans, and what I saw over the last 25 hours absolutely blew me away, and just as you sometimes make projections or predictions, I’m gonna do one right here. That speech puts Cory Booker as one of the leaders of the Democratic Party in 2028.”
Luntz concluded, “And I’ll go even further. If you ask Democratic senators right now who they’d rather have lead them over the next three years, they would choose Cory Booker over Chuck Schumer. That’s how significant today was.”
Think fast, Chuck…
Everybody hates Elon (and Donald’s dumb tariffs, too)
I continue to stand by the Associated Press, but this headline is as big a whiff as the White House Correspondents Association’s bullshit excuse for canceling Amber Ruffin:
In fact he is really unpopular, with everyone except his base.
And not for no reason. He is preparing the launch the biggest tax hike in the history of the world, as described by the conservative-leaning Telegraph:
We might think of him as a tax-cutter, an enemy of big government, and an instinctive ally of businesses and consumers, and in his first term he certainly was. And yet as his second term takes shape, President Trump is morphing into something very different.
The final details of “Liberation Day” on Wednesday still have to be finalised. But the White House appears to be planning steep new tariffs, imposed on all of the US’s trading partners. On Fox News, Peter Navarro, one of the key backers of the tariff policy, suggested that levies on auto imports should raise $100 billion a year for the federal government. More significantly, he estimated that across the board tariffs would collect $600 billion annually.
Economists and trade experts will no doubt argue about the precise sum that might be raised. No American government has imposed tariffs on this scale in more than a century.
Some of the burden might be absorbed by foreign companies. State-backed Chinese companies, for example, might choose to live with the levies, given that they are more interested in increasing market share than making money. In other cases, production might shift from Stuttgart to San Francisco, or Lyon to Louisville, turning imports into domestic products.
By far most likely, however, is that much of the increased cost will be passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Either they will be forced to pay more for imported goods, or prices may rise in general because US companies have less of an incentive to improve productivity thanks to the protections afforded by that tariff wall.
And if tariffs do raise $600 billion annually, that is no small sum of money, even for an enormous economy like the United States.
Yet in the mind of the mad king, returning the U.S. to a 19th century economy is liberation.
Good luck with that, Donald.
The truth is that this experiment in kleptocracy and oligarchy has all but destroyed Tesla (you damned near can’t trade in your ugly cybertruck at this point) … Elon Musk’s global reputation (such that it ever existed in a positive light) … and Republican chances of regaining control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court (which is great news for democracy, in that Republicans won’t be able to rig the 2026 and 2028 elections in their favor.)
Last night was a warning for Republicans in so many ways, and they know it.
Republicans emerged from Tuesday’s elections on shaky footing.
Over the past 10 weeks, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have worked to hobble the federal government, pummel into submission the country’s most powerful independent institutions and enact a sweeping nationalist agenda with little regard — and often disdain — for political norms and the Constitution itself. And they’ve done so with near-universal support from the GOP in Washington.
Then the voters got the chance to speak.
In two deep-red House districts in Florida, Republicans had lower-than-expected margins as they clinched the safe seats vacated by “America First” royalty only after sending in national and state reinforcements, including Trump himself, to drum up support. And in Wisconsin, they suffered a crushing defeat in a record-breakingly expensive Supreme Court race. After Musk’s money and personality dominated the contest, liberal Judge Susan Crawford secured a 9-point victory against Trump’s endorsed candidate, Brad Schimel.
“I’m honestly shocked. I thought we had it in the bag,” said Pam Van Handel, chair of the Republican Party of Wisconsin’s Outagamie County. “I thought [Musk] was going to be an asset for this race. People love Trump, but maybe they don’t love everybody he supports. Maybe I have blinders on.”
Rohn Bishop, the mayor of Waupun, Wisconsin, and former chair of the Republican Party of Fond du Lac County, admitted that the race “throws up a bunch of warning signs for the midterm election.”
“I thought maybe Elon coming could turn these people to go out and vote,” Bishop said. Instead, he added, “I think [Musk] helped get out voters in that he may have turned out more voters against [Schimel].”
And the oligarch in charge of Trump knows it, too. Here’s what he said before the election:
Even in Florida, where Signal group chat afficionado Mike Waltz and “would-have-been Pam Bondi but for the teens” ex-congressman Matt Goetz’s seats remained in Republican hands, the shift went in only one direction.
The maga backlash has come. From the Wall Street Journal:
Democrats solidified their 4-3 progressive majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Tuesday, and the ramifications are nationwide. The comfortable win by Democratic Judge Susan Crawford is the second sign in two weeks of a political backlash against the Trump Presidency.
Democrats turned out in large numbers to defeat Republican Judge Brad Schimel in a race in which the two sides may have spent as much as $100 million. Democrats sought to make the race a referendum on Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and Mr. Musk responded by trying to mobilize the Trump voters who tend to stay home in spring elections. The Democratic bet paid off.
That’s a warning to the GOP that the Trump-Musk governing style is stirring a backlash that could cost them control of Congress next year. All the more so given the results in two special House races in Florida Tuesday to replace a pair of Republicans.
These are safe seats, and Republicans won the western Panhandle district held by Matt Gaetz with some room to spare. But Jimmy Patronis’s 57% was about nine points less than the 66% that Mr. Gaetz won in 2024. It was a similar story in the Palm Coast seat of former Rep. Mike Waltz, who is now Mr. Trump’s national security adviser.
Democrats had a better candidate, but the swing to Democrats was about nine points from Mr. Waltz’s 66.5% vote share in 2024 to state Sen. Randy Fine’s roughly 57% on Tuesday. Democrats are fired up to make a statement about Mr. Trump’s polarizing second term. Last week they flipped a Pennsylvania state Senate seat long held by the GOP.
Republicans can console themselves that they held the Florida seats and thus their narrow House majority. And we hope the results don’t scare House Republicans into backing away from their tax and regulatory reform agenda. That’s what Democrats would love, so next year they’d get the benefit both ways—motivated Democrats and sullen Republicans after a GOP governing failure.
But the elections are a warning to Mr. Trump to focus on what got him re-elected—especially prices and growth in real incomes after inflation. His willy-nilly tariff agenda undermining stock prices and consumer and business confidence isn’t helping.
All of this while Democrats are finding their leaders … and per ABC News, even King Donald may be getting sick of his weirdo Svengali…
[This post has been updated.]
I’m glad you called out the major networks for not covering it better. And even so, 10s of thousands found ways to listen for hours and hours. I hope someone takes that filibuster and publishes it as a key American history book that will live on and never to be banned or burned. He defined us in the brightest light, calling us all to be braver and do MORE!
Thank you, Joy for your insights. Let us hope that Schumer has seen the light and will do right thing and resign his position as Minority Leader, and endorse Cory Booker.