Sen. Jeff Merkley held the floor for 16 hours and the numbers continued to grow.
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WASHINGTON – Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) held a vigil on the Senate floor from Tuesday to Wednesday morning, delivering a marathon speech disrupting Congress and protesting the Trump administration’s policies as lawmakers struggle to reopen the federal government.
As of 10:20 a.m., the nearly 69-year-old senator had been speaking for 16 hours. He started speaking at 6:21pm the previous day.
Merkley said his filibuster, known as a procedural tactic, was aimed at sounding the alarm on both the government shutdown and President Donald Trump, who in his view was dragging the country “further into authoritarianism.”
“Mr. Trump’s plan is to replace government of the people, for the people, with government of the powerful, for the powerful,” he said at one point.
“This is an incredible threat to our country, to our entire constitutional vision,” he said at another point. “I don’t think there’s a single senator here in the United States Senate who wants freedom to be crushed and authoritarian rule established here in the United States of America. … Our nation’s founders did not want the president to be the king.”
Merkley’s speech comes as Democrats are increasingly willing to resort to drastic measures to exert their relatively small political influence over Republicans in Congress. The government shutdown, caused largely by Democratic demands over health care policy and the refusal of Republican leaders to negotiate those demands within budget deadlines, is now the second longest in U.S. history.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made headlines earlier this year when he gave the longest speech in history, lasting 25 hours, on the Senate floor. Mr. Booker has also been vocal against the Trump administration, breaking the record set in 1957 by racist Sen. Strom Thurmond.
Before Wednesday, Merkley’s own longest speech on the Senate floor was in 2017, lasting 15 hours and 27 minutes.
Zachary Schermele is a Congressional reporter for USA TODAY. You can email us at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and on Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social..
