From March 31 to April 1, senior Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey delivered a record-breaking speech lasting 25 hours and 6 minutes. The topic? Protesting about President Donald Trump’s second term and the many policies and executive orders that he has put into place.
The previous longest speech was by Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina in protest of the Civil Rights movement in 1957.
Booker’s speech was an effective way to take control of the floor and stall any bills that the Republican-controlled senate tried to pass. This was an amazing thing to do and listen to; it also addressed the issues that the President could cause by cutting Medicare and Medicaid – and what could happen in the future.
One of the main topics of the speech was Parkinson’s Disease, which is a disorder of the nervous system that affects movement and speech, and it gets worse over time. The main point of his Parkinson’s talk was that without the help of Medicare, young men and women wouldn’t be able to diagnose Parkinson’s early, drastically changing the amount of treatment they could receive.
Another topic was the Department of Government Efficiency (D.O.G.E.). D.O.G.E. is one of the stupidest departments and decisions ever created and implemented by President Trump. As a child of a social worker, I am aware of the amount of stress my family has experienced over the mass firings that Elon Musk did of social workers. Some other careers that have had to worry about these mass firings are aircraft marshalls and forest rangers.
Booker also spoke about how the President planned to dissolve the Department of Education, which is dumb. Dismantling the Department of Education eliminates a myriad of education policies that affect thousands of students who are affected by special needs, and without these policies their protection and funding for future education goes away.
Booker is brave to address these policies, seeing that people who want to speak against President Trump are often threatened with firing and losing their career just for sharing their opinion. The First Amendment in the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but Trump and his allies are quickly making it clear that that freedom extends perhaps only to people who agree with them.
