A Special Note on Corey Booker

It's about the spirit of America.

AFGE holds rally in Upper Senate Park to stand up for government workers' jobs, pay, benefits, and rights at work. In attendance were House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Senators Cory Booker, Maize Hirono, and Chuck Schumer; Representatives Steny Hoyer, Gerry Connolly, Joe Crowley, Keith Ellison, Jan Schakowsky, and Ben Ray Lujan; AFGE members; and other union activists. Photo by Keith Mellnick.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you a special note on a matter of public concern. Some moments refuse to be background noise, they ask us to look up, to listen, and to remember.

Cory Booker’s filibuster broke the record once held by Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina senator who famously stood for over 24 hours in an attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1957. Thurmond’s stand was not one of principle but of protest—a desperate, vocal defiance of desegregation and racial justice. The bill passed regardless, establishing the Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department—an institution now under siege by political actors who carry the echoes of that same resistance.

Some pundits, in their cool dissection, have nodded to Booker’s stamina while brushing aside the substance. They say what he said won’t matter. But this is not a time for such flattened analysis. Booker’s words were not policy points; they were a prayer. In an age when the moral architecture of the Civil Rights generation is being burned away by the bonfires of resentment, his filibuster was not about utility—it was about memory, and faith.

I came of age in the shadow of lost illusions. I graduated the semester after Hillary Clinton’s 2016 defeat. The lights had just dimmed on the Obama presidency, and the next act was chaos—a carnival of grievance and scapegoating fueled by the brittle bones of a conservative movement unwilling to own what it had become. I remember being at a conference that summer in Long Beach, watching Ted Cruz urge delegates to “vote your conscience.” It was like watching a ghost plead with a room of zombies. That moment felt like the last breath of an ideology with no more language for repentance.

The years that followed brought a storm: supremacists running for office without shame, Islamophobic scapegoating in national campaigns, the assault on queer lives, the rollback of protections once assumed permanent. Institutions meant to shield the vulnerable are being hollowed out, not by accident, but by design. And hovering above it all is the smug indifference of wealth, manipulating policy and warping democracy into a market product.

Booker’s stand wasn’t about winning a vote. It was about refusing to surrender something deeper. His words held space for an older dream—of a multiracial democracy still unfinished, still gasping for air. It was a reminder that not all light comes with a headline, and not all victories arrive with a tally.

To those who say it didn’t change anything: perhaps you weren’t meant to hear it. Perhaps it wasn’t for the transactional, but for the transcendent. America’s crisis is not just political...it is spiritual. And spiritual reckonings require voices that do more than manage a narrative. They require courage, clarity, and yes, love.

Not the saccharine kind. The kind of love that holds the line. That stands for 25 hours when sitting would be easier. That invokes names like John Lewis and reminds us that good trouble can be sacred when necessary.

Let us not dismiss this moment as a blip in the news cycle. Let us listen to what was said...not because it secured a legislative win, but because it told the truth.

And in times like these, truth is the most powerful act of all.