Happy Liberation Day. As we await this afternoon’s tariff announcement (you can read Bob Kuttner on the absurdity of the strategy), I wanted to take stock of the Democrats’ liberation from timidity and cowardice. The shift is agonizingly slow, but it’s happening.
Yesterday, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) finished a 25-hour speech on the Senate floor, eclipsing the previous record for longevity set by Strom Thurmond, who was speaking against the rights of people like Cory Booker to live equally in this country. The speech, peppered with expressions of basic principles of democracy, testimonials from constituents, and assistance from 30 Senate Democrats who asked questions to allow for brief pauses, let the country know that there was a fight going on in Washington, and that there was an actual opponent in that fight. At one point, the speech had 350 million likes on TikTok, and something like a million concurrent views in the vast wasteland of X.
You could dismiss it cynically as a stunt, as performative, but politics is in part about performance, and ringing the emergency alarm is sometimes necessary to cut through the noise. Especially in moments of, well, emergency.
But talk must be followed up with action. Immediately after Booker’s peroration, the Senate moved to confirm Matthew Whitaker as ambassador to NATO, and this advanced to a vote without objection. The same senators who praised Booker for gumming up the Senate to make a point allowed unanimous consent on yet another Trump nominee. (Whitaker was confirmed 52-45.)
Now in this case, denying unanimous consent would have just forced two extra hours of debate. But why not do that? Democrats have granted UC over 500 times in the Senate since the inauguration. If they simply did not do that, it would have added more floor time than has been used up all year. When an authoritarian president is destroying what’s left of the government, lying down to swiftly confirm his partners in the task makes no sense. The public certainly wants to see pushback, as evidenced by Booker’s speech and the reception it received.
Time is the great unrenewable resource on the Senate floor. Everything requires agreement from all senators to move forward without friction. Because there’s only so much time, slowing down the confirmations of Trump appointees or judges, or the advancement of right-wing legislation, creates bargaining leverage. Do Republicans want things to move more quickly? Restore the inspectors general who were fired. Do they want to go home for a long weekend? Reverse cuts to Social Security field offices. Do the geriatric GOP senators not want to stick around all night? Stand down on Congressional Review Act efforts to cancel regulations. (That last one is particularly important, since CRA resolutions on Biden-era rules can only be voted on until mid-May: You actually could run out the clock.) Do they want to bundle some appointee votes together? It looks like Elon Musk is already gone, but how about winding down DOGE?
If the Booker speech was a one-off, the Senate Democratic leadership hasn’t learned a thing. But there are signs of life. Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) put a hold yesterday on all Veterans Affairs appointees until cuts to the VA are restored. And Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) did the same for the U.S. attorney nominee for the District of Columbia, Ed Martin.
These are baby steps, and there ought to be a full strategy from Democrats to hold up everything, deny unanimous consent, and do the procedural equivalent of chaining themselves to the Capitol Rotunda until the attack on government ends. But Democrats are starting to crawl and even walk, a necessary beginning before running.
