Jeff Merkley, Oregon’s Democratic senator, is giving a marathon speech on the Senate floor that will soon enter its 19th hour to make the case that Donald Trump is acting as an authoritarian, including by deploying the military into his home town of Portland.
The 68-year-old senator began speaking around 6.20pm on Tuesday evening and continued with few interruptions into Wednesday morning. Standing continuously on the Senate floor alongside placards that read “authoritarianism is here now!” and “Trump is violating the law”, Merkley has paused only to take questions from fellow Democratic senators.
“I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the biggest threat to our republic since the civil war. President Trump is shredding our constitution,” Merkley said as he began his speech.
Merkley spoke a day after a federal appeals court had allowed the president to send the national guard into Portland over the objections of local leaders, who say there is no merit to the president’s claim that the city is a “war zone”. Trump has also ordered a similar deployment of troops into Chicago, where federal agents are carrying out an aggressive crackdown targeting people they believe to be undocumented immigrants. The supreme court is poised to consider a legal challenge to that move.
The senator touched on those deployments to cities that are overwhelmingly Democratic, as well as other instances where the president is seen as retaliating against his political enemies, including the charges a handpicked US attorney has filed against the New York state attorney general, Letitia James, and former FBI director James Comey.
“Equal justice under law – that’s the vision here in America. Not unequal injustice, which is what the president is pursuing by taking the power of the government and going after individuals that he does not like or perceives to be political opponents,” Merkley said.
“That’s what you read about in authoritarian governments far away, and you go, that would never happen in the United States of America, but it is happening right here, right now.”
A spokesman for the senator says he is planning to speak “as long as he can”.
Merkley’s address is the second instance this year in which a Democratic senator has staged a lengthy floor speech to condemn Trump’s policies. About two months after Trump’s inauguration, Cory Booker of New Jersey spoke for 25 hours and five minutes, setting a new record for the longest speech ever by a solo senator.
On Wednesday morning, the Oregon senator stood speaking from a lectern where he had placed a small glass of water and a copy of How Democracies Die, a 2018 book by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt detailing how representative governments around the world have been dismantled.
As Wednesday went on, Democratic senators trooped to the floor to ask Merkley – who has remained standing throughout – questions that doubled as opportunities to air their own grievances against the administration.
“We are seeing a time now that if we do not ring the alarm bells, more and more Americans will be hurt by a president who is acting more like an authoritarian leader than a democratically elected executive,” Booker said.
Connecticut’s Richard Blumenthal likened Trump’s partial demolition of the White House East Wing to layoffs and funding cuts he has ordered across the government.
“This destruction that Donald Trump is doing to the White House is emblematic of the wrecking ball he is taking to our democracy. Put aside the waste of money that could be used to improve our education system, solve food insecurity, guarantee the election integrity of this nation – the damage that he’s doing to this iconic symbol of America is so costly to our image and esteem around the world,” Blumenthal said.
Ron Wyden, Oregon’s senior senator, said in an interview that his counterpart was “making some particularly, relevant and important points about the threat”.
Asked if other Senate Democrats were planning such lengthy speeches, Wyden said: “You take them one at a time, but I think what Senator Merkley is doing is very important.”
The speech comes on the 22nd day of the government shutdown that began at the start of the month, when Democrats and Republicans failed to agree on legislation to extend funding beyond the end of September.
The Senate has held 11 unsuccessful votes on a Republican-backed bill to extend funding through 21 November, which Democrats have blocked because it does not including healthcare funding that they are demanding, as well as curbs on Trump’s use of rescissions to slash funding approved by Congress.
