Oh Good, Cory Booker Has Turned His Historic Senate Speech Into … a Book Deal!

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When New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker delivered the longest speech in Senate history in April, to protest the cuts to public services enacted by Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency group, people were inspired. Across the United States, at water coolers and in the bars that are somehow occupied during weekday daylight hours by a diverse crowd of patrons watching a single television, citizens asked themselves: Is this the turning point, the moment when the wave begins to recede? When a party—and a country—finally begins to Stand Up for Itself?

Well, the answer to that was no. Since his speech, Booker has voted with Republicans to confirm one of the most comprehensively corrupt individuals in American public life to an ambassadorship and to pass a cryptocurrency bill that will give a major boost to Donald Trump’s personal crypto business while leaving the industry as a whole dangerously underregulated and liable to cause a systemic crash. (The latter link goes to an analysis issued by the Democratic Party’s own Banking Committee staff.) The DOGE and DOGE-adjacent dismantling of services related to vaccines, disaster relief, scientific research, and the U.S.’s general preeminence as a center of global innovation and prosperity have continued. The air traffic control system at Newark airport, in Booker’s own state, is evidently running on two tin cans and a piece of string that broke in 1993. Democrats lost a vote in the narrowly divided House after a 74-year-old member died of the cancer he had already been diagnosed with when the party named him ranking member of the Oversight Committee in January. The congressional resistance to Trump is doing whatever the opposite of firing on all cylinders is. It is … failing on all cylinders? Freezing on all canisters?

However! Cory Booker is turning his speech into a book! Congratulations to him; it will be released in November. “This book is about the virtues vital to our success as a nation and lessons we can draw from generations of Americans who fought for them,” Booker says in a statement. Its cover appears to depict the massive crowd surrounding the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool during the 1963 March on Washington, an event at which Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for the passage of legislation supported by cryptocurrency lobbyists.

In publishing a call-to-arms-type book about politics this year, Booker joins House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, both of whom also held their positions of caucus leadership during the period in which Democrats failed to bring Trump to trial for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection and greased the rails for the renomination of Joe Biden, who, it now turns out, was probably experiencing cognitive decline to an extent that was evident for years to all the people who were interacting with him privately.

To be fair, the Democrats in Congress have very little leverage, and if getting things done from the minority were easy, they would have done it by now. On the other hand, taking time off from “the fight” to promote a low-effort inspirational book about successful fights that occurred in the past is, ironically, not how most successful fights are conducted, at least according to my understanding of the historic achievements discussed in a notable recent Senate speech that is being turned into a book.

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