Cory Booker Attempts Fiery Speech on Senate Floor, Gets More Laughs Than Likes

“If we really are going to take on Donald Trump, we need to win. It’s not long speeches on the floor,” Democrat Senator Cortez Masto said of her colleague.

Shakespeare famously said "all the world's a stage." There are few people in U.S. politics for whom that old adage is more applicable than Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.), a true aficionado of political theatre. Booker—a bonafide thespian if ever there was one—has broken records for long-winded diatribes and 25 hour speeches.

Last week, Booker once again stepped into the spotlight to deliver an impassioned performance on the Senate floor in an attempt to block a package of police funding bills. There, he accused his Democrat colleagues of being “complicit with Donald Trump,” and not fighting hard enough against “an authoritarian leader who is trashing our country." 

“There’s a lot of us in this caucus that want to f*cking fight. And what bothers me right now is we don’t see enough fight in this caucus,” said Booker. “It's time for us to fight. It's time for us to draw a line, and when it comes to the safety of my state being denied these grants, that's why I'm standing here."

Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), who introduced the bills, fired back at Booker to argue that “long speeches” do little to help Democrats combat the Trump administration. 

“Why would you throw out good legislation that’s going to benefit everyone across the country? That doesn’t make sense. We still have to have a functioning government. That’s part of gaining the trust of Americans again, so they understand there are people that are working on their behalf,” Cortez Masto said in a New York Times interview.

“The package I was putting forth was how do we give law enforcement across the country more tools to keep our communities safe,” she continued. “Everyone wants a safe community! That should be something we should be talking about and passing.”

Naturally, pundits on all sides of the political spectrum agree that the spat between Booker and Cortez Mastro was indicative of the divided nature of the current Democratic party. The divide stems from the decision of whether or not to expedite the confirmation of Trump’s nominees in time for the long-awaited August recess. In delaying the confirmation, Democrats have forced votes to take place late into the evening, resulting in the waste of weeks of floor time. 

To make matters worse for Democrats, the Party recently received their lowest popularity rating in three decades based on polling data that was released at the end of last month by the Wall Street Journal. The survey, conducted by Democrat and Republican pollsters John Anzalone and Tony Fabrizio respectively, revealed that only about one third of voters view Democrats as favorable, and not even 10% view them as “very favorable.” 

It certainly doesn’t help establish public trust when prominent Democrats like Booker work to block public safety legislation proposed by fellow colleagues.

“The Democratic brand is so bad that they don’t have the credibility to be a critic of Trump or the Republican Party,” said Anzalone. “Until they reconnect with real voters and working people on who they’re for and what their economic message is, they’re going to have problems.”

“We are in a crisis right now,” Booker told reporters. “We are watching our democracy, democratic norms, traditions and rules being violated by a president who has authoritarian tendencies. That’s why I’m saying, fundamentally, we must fight and fight harder.”

Since 2018, Booker has been mockingly called “Spartacus” after he threatened to release classified documents during then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination hearings and bizarrely declared “this is the closest I’ll ever get in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” a reference to the 1960 Academy Award-winning Stanley Kubrick film. Booker was—and still is—widely lampooned for this, and it cemented his reputation as the king of performative politics.

“The sad part is that Booker’s antics are only a bit cheesier than other Democrats’ performative ‘resistance,’ whether it’s sit-ins at ICE facilities, kumbaya-style teach-ins on the steps of the Capitol, holding up grumpy signs at the State of the Union address, or filming cringy TikToks,” the New York Post’s editorial board wrote about Booker’s recent stunt.

Unfortunately for Booker, the fiery speech is getting more laughs than likes from the public. In one reupload of his remarks, Facebook users hit the “laughing emoji” reaction 76,000 times as opposed to only 12,000 presses of the like button. One can imagine Senator Booker in the final act looking out in anticipation of an uproarious crowd—a standing ovation to celebrate the actor's spirited performance—only to find a flurry of proverbial tomatoes. A tragic way to end the show, indeed.

Until the Senator is ready to read from the same script as his fellow Democrats, perhaps it’s time to close the curtain on all these theatrics.