Op-Ed: Cory Booker Talks Like A Fighter—But Votes Like A Friend
Cory Booker can deliver a rousing speech, but aren’t y’all tired of politicians performing resistance versus engaging in any meaningful forms of it?
The sharpest and most succinct accounting of the New Jersey Senator’s latest attention-grabbing stunt on the Senate floor last week was unsurprisingly not found in mainstream media but via a social media post: “Cory Booker is in an eternal audition for Hamilton.”
I tried to give Booker a nod for his 25-hour speech in April that took a record away from a dead segregationist, but not long after that, he was the lone Democrat to vote in favor of Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, a pardoned felon, as Ambassador to France.
His rationale for it, via statement, went as follows: “I have passionate differences and disagreements with Charlie Kushner, but I supported his confirmation because he has been unrelenting in reforming our criminal justice system and has substantively helped achieve the liberation of thousands of people from unjust incarceration.”
Mhmm. I’m sure it had nothing to do with longstanding ties Booker has had with Charles Kushner, which includes a friendship with his son Jared Kushner and daughter-in-law Ivanka Trump.
That was one of many reasons why it was odd to hear Booker of all people lecture other Democrats in the Senate as he sought to amend some bipartisan police benefits bills with language that would stop the Trump administration from withholding Department of Justice grants for political reasons.
As Booker argued in remarks, members of his party are complying with Trump as he “violates the Constitution” and “trashes our norms and traditions.”
Booker scolded his fellow Democrats for not having enough “backbone” to resist Trump.
“What I am tired of is when the president of the United States violates the Constitution … and what does the Democratic Party do? Comply? Allow him? Beg for scraps? No, I demand justice,” he said on the floor.
“That is complicity with an authoritarian leader who is trashing our country,” Booker continued. “It is time for Democrats to have a backbone. 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.”
Booker reportedly could have raised these concerns in the Judiciary Committee, which unanimously approved the bill before it went to a full Senate vote. Instead, he chose not to speak up there.
Booker told his Senate colleagues not to question his “integrity” for taking his complaints to the Senate floor, where cameras roll and viral moments are born. But why shouldn’t we question it when he makes it so easy to do so?
Similar to his moves in April after his other viral speech, days after Booker talked about authoritarianism and the need for Democrats not to be complicit in injustice, when it came time to support Senator Bernie Sanders’ call to block weapons sales to Israel amid growing outrage over its military assault and aid blockade in Gaza, he did not join the record number of Senate Democrats voted in favor of a resolution.
After his Senate floor speech, Booker told CNN: “History is going to remember these people for their complicity in what is a guy that’s going to severely try to undermine our government—who already incited a riot on our Capitol. This is a moment in history where people are going to ask, ‘Where did you stand? Did you bow to an authoritarian leader or did you stand strong and fight?’”
How does this same logic not apply to his vote on Sanders’ resolution or his 172-word statement on the starvation crisis in Gaza that Al Jazeera noted mentions the word “Israel” only once – in calling for a strategy to “strengthen Israel’s security” at that?
And does it not also apply to Booker choosing to actually pose in a photo with the man responsible for what’s happening in Gaza, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu?
Someone who can’t stand up to the lobbying groups that have donated heavily to him—groups that have kept him largely silent on Gaza—is hardly the person to lecture other Democrats about growing a backbone against authoritarian regimes.
The influence from those groups, along with others from the financial industry, likely explains Booker’s other recent display of hypocrisy: his refusal to endorse progressive candidate Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor.
“NYC, I love you. You’re my neighbor. You guys figure out your elections. I’m going to be focused on mine,” Booker said when asked about Mamdani over the weekend.
However, as Mehdi Hasan swiftly pointed out, in 2021, Booker “reached out” to Eric Adams three weeks after he won the Democratic mayoral primary. And back in 2009, he endorsed Michael Bloomberg, who was not a Democrat, for mayor.
This is the core problem with Cory Booker: he can grandstand better than most, but when it comes down to his vote, he is yet another example of a virtue-signaling liberal whose actions never match their words.
That type of moral bankruptcy should not continue yielding more campaign donations, MSNBC bookings, podcast appearances, and the like, but revelation and, ideally, replacement of someone whose progressive politics go beyond mere performance and prose.
Michael Arceneaux is a New York Times bestselling author whose most recent book, I Finally Bought Some Jordans, was published last March.
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