What did Cory Booker 25-Hour speech actually achieve in terms of change?
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Let's be fair now: he also raised his national profile among the party faithful.
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How would that possibly have prevented his confirmation? It still went through after Booker's speech on a party-line vote, didn't it? What could Booker have said that would have shifted their opinion? What would you have said during a filibuster that would have any other effect on the party that was bound and determined to confirm him?
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Lol yeah, that too.
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the same way thurmond did it; you secure the votes behinds the scenes and then throw a filibuster when it's time to vote to turn up the pain; not when there's nothing on the table and no one around like booker did it.
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Oh my fucking god. Everyone suggesting he only did this to raise his profile for a presidential run has got to be feeling pretty silly about their lack of cynicism right now. I know I do.
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Come on, do you truly think there was any chance they'd be interested in shaking hands behind the scenes? These people bowed so low to their king that their pants split months ago. They can't even stand up straight at this point. Yet somehow, I'm the idealist here.
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What does anything achieve on a long enough timeline? The same nothingness, but for 25 hours the entire senate could do nothing but bear witness to a an unyielding resistance to the cruelties currently in motion. May not be much but some will find inspiration in those that continue to make 'good trouble' I personally found a spark of hope and I'm a real cynic tbh
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I'm seeing a post and some great comments that were achieved by the speech that's for sure
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Politics isn’t sportsball, so no. Breaking arbitrary stats doesn’t mean shit in terms of making material changes in the world, which is what politics is about.
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What did your comment achieve?
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And you are the arbiter of what's meaningful to someone else? Spout off about "sportsball" all you want, but your lack of vision for what material change this might possibly inspire in others helps nobody. Someone, somewhere out there, is fired up over this, and they'll enact more change than this dogwater attitude ever will.
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Good for that piece of shit Zionist genocidaire then, I guess.
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This is essentially what I was going to say (though more poetic).
I'm of two minds. I admit that i cringe a bit that he would even call this "good trouble". John Lewis' "good trouble" was nearly getting beaten to death. How Booker can apply such a label to an act of protest that didn't even meaningfully delay any noteworthy business is frankly amazing to me.
But also, he did fucking do something. He specifically articulated that we should all be alarmed, and he declared that he intends to not cooperate with or normalize what is happening. Low bar? Yes. But we all have to start somewhere.
I actually like Cory Booker. He was my third or fourth pick among the 20-something candidates that ran in 2020.
I'll say this: this act is not enough to convince me that elected Democrats are going to do anything meaningful in the next two years. But the absence of it would've made me far less likely to expect it. Good for him.
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It is not unreasonable to ask why he didn't use the filibuster to block actual legislation, instead of just I terupting procedure.
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Nothing. It was cringe and should be condemned. Don't let hasbara bots convince you otherwise.
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Nothing by itself. But if it can encourage other senators to filibuster, and more importantly, to organize to filibuster together , the impact could be paralyzing.
To take an obvious example, for half a century, from say 1910 to 1964-5, there were more than enough votes in the US senate to enact civil rights legislation, as only .
But that legislation never happened. And the reason why is that southern senators were able to filibuster so effectively that the legislation could never be brought to the floor.
The it’s not that the votes on that specific bill weren’t there. It’s just that under the leadership of Sen Richard Russel of Georgia (who the “Russel Senate Office Building” is named after), the southern senators understood the way to block legislation was to filibuster not just the bill in question, but any law up that was so important economically that senators couldn’t afford to let it lapse.
So they organized, set up “watches” where at least one senator had to be on the floor to defeat any quorum calls (which ends a filibuster, as you do not actually have to be talking to filibuster a bill), and filibustered not just votes on key bills, but even votes on motions to bring those bills out of committee to the floor.
Obviously, the democrats now aren’t doing that. But they could. And by generating headlines by filibustering, he encourages other senators to do so, if only for popularity.
