Why Cory Booker Accused Democrats of Complicity With Trump

At the end of this past March, New Jersey senator Cory Booker made history with a record-setting speech, holding the floor for more than 25 hours in an effort to dramatize the horrors of Donald Trump’s legislative agenda as it began to unfold. Depending on how you looked at it, Booker either provided a model for the kind of resistance congressional Democrats needed to show to Trump 2.0 or illustrated how little real power they possessed to obstruct a majority party under the thumb of an authoritarian president using every available lever of control.

Now Booker is back in the news as part of a new and less visible chapter in the same story: the struggle of Democrats to make themselves effective or even relevant in fighting Trump. As the Associated Press reported, on Tuesday Booker harshly struck out at his colleagues for going along with some low-profile police-funding measures that he believed shortchanged his own blue state:

Angrily screaming at two of his shocked Democratic colleagues, his words all but reverberating off the chamber walls, Booker blocked the passage of several bipartisan bills that would fund police programs, arguing that President Donald Trump’s administration has been withholding law enforcement money from Democratic-leaning states.

“This is the problem with Democrats in America right now,” Booker bellowed. “Is we’re willing to be complicit with Donald Trump!”

One object of Booker’s ire, Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, had moved for unanimous Senate consent on a funding package agreed to at the committee level some time ago, and another, Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, chided Booker for not objecting to the measures earlier. Booker did not take it well:

“The Democratic party needs a wake up call!” he yelled, walking away from his desk and out into the aisle. “I see law firms bending the knee to this president, not caring about the larger principles,” he said, along with “universities that should be bastions of free speech.”

He added: “You want to come at me that way, you will have to take it on with me because there’s too much on the line.”

It is very likely that Booker’s explosion wasn’t just about police grants, or some long-suppressed anger at Klobuchar, his fellow unsuccessful 2020 presidential candidate. Senate Democrats are about to have another key moment of truth over how far they are willing to go to fight Trump, and it’s unclear they have their act together at all.

You may recall that shortly before Booker’s 25-hour speech, Senate Democrats went right up to the brink of forcing a government shutdown by filibustering a Republican-drafted stopgap spending measure, and then flinched, led by Chuck Schumer, who supplied just enough votes on a procedural motion to let the bill pass. Among those joining Schumer in this surrender, coincidentally or not, was Cortez Masto. Booker (and for that matter, Klobuchar), did not.

The same scenario is almost certainly going to face Senate Democrats at the end of September, when that stopgap spending measure expires. Again, they will have to decide whether to give up their last real bit of leverage over Trump’s legislative agenda or invite a government shutdown they really don’t want. And worse yet, the context now is even more frustrating than it was in March, given Republican complicity in Russ Vought’s efforts to claw back previously approved spending via rescissions, which he is expected to continue and perhaps intensify. To avoid a government shutdown, Democrats will need to enter into spending agreements the administration and its congressional allies have no intention of keeping. As of now, there’s no real strategy in place for Democrats to deal with the oncoming crisis.

And so they are prone to the kind of outbursts in which Booker indulged himself this week. Ironically, there is one form of resistance Senate Democrats have undertaken that really is effective but one that, by definition, doesn’t represent the kind of loud-and-proud defiance Democratic activists crave: slow-walking confirmations of Trump’s executive and judicial nominees. As Punchbowl News explains, they’ve been quite successful in bringing confirmations to a slow crawl:

Senate Democrats argue there can’t be business-as-usual while Trump is abusing his power on so many fronts and putting forward unqualified nominees. So they’ve forced Thune to file cloture on every Trump nominee, a Senate-speak way of saying they’re running out the procedural clock, even for those whose positions have never required a roll-call vote. …

While Republicans have done their fair share of blocking Democratic presidents’ nominees, which has long been a key leverage point for senators, what Democrats are doing is indeed unprecedented. Not every Democrat is endorsing the tactic, but all it takes is one to deny unanimous consent.

This is not the sort of tactic that will get Democrats attaboys from their activist base, which looks at Senate confirmations and may only see MAGA thugs like Emil Bove securing life-time appointments to a federal appeals court. So Democrats are understandably eager to make noise, and Cory Booker has again risen to the occasion.