WASHINGTON, D.C. — There was no nursery rhyme reciting nor phone book reading. No cots wheeled out for senators to catch naps in between speechifying.
But one by one Wednesday night and into Thursday, Senate Democrats flocked to the floor for an all-night talkathon to protest the confirmation of Russell T. Vought, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the White House budget office and an architect of his ultraconservative Project 2025 policy agenda.
Several senators swigged caffeinated beverages. One arrived straight from a black-tie banquet. The eyes were bleary, but the outrage was fierce as Democrats took turns railing against Vought, who has orchestrated many of Trump’s moves to go around Congress to dismantle and defund the federal government.
They had no hope of stopping Vought. Consigned to the minority, Democrats lacked the votes to block him or any other Trump nominee so long as Republicans continued to largely hold together in support. Still, the all-nighter was a chance for members of a party that is under intense pressure from its base to push back more strongly against Trump to at least attempt to show they were trying.
“Mr. President, it’s getting late,” Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said not long before 11 p.m., about 10 hours into the gabfest. He criticized Republicans for failing to join in opposition to Vought but also made clear that the nonstop speeches had just as much to do with Democrats and their message to the public.
“I think what has been missing is the overarching narrative: ‘What are they doing? And why are they doing it?’” Schiff said. “Tonight, we are beginning to tell that story.”
It was mostly a story of performative protest.
The session was not an actual old-school filibuster, when a group of senators would hold the floor — sometimes filling the time with meaningless, unrelated talk — in efforts to delay legislation to death. A change in Senate rules a dozen years ago did away with filibusters for presidential nominees. Earlier Wednesday, senators voted along party lines, 53-47, to advance Vought’s nomination. The Senate was expected to vote later Thursday to confirm him, most likely in another party-line move.
And yet Democrats lined up for their late-night and early-morning speaking slots to telegraph the intensity of their opposition.
“We’re going to be speaking all night,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, said as his colleagues prepared to burn through the clock. “We want Americans, every hour, whether it’s 8 p.m. or 3 a.m., to hear how bad Russell Vought is and the danger he poses to them in their daily lives.”
Arriving just before midnight after her comedic speaking slot at the Washington Press Club Foundation annual dinner — one of many events where politicians and journalists poke fun at one another over dinner and drinks — Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., shifted from humor to attack mode. She said Trump and Vought were pushing the limits of executive power and overstepping the president’s constitutional authority, pointing to Trump’s attempt to freeze trillions of dollars in federal funding as one example.
“What is the role of Congress? What did our Founding Fathers want? What is the role of the courts?” Klobuchar said, gesturing to the nearly empty chamber. “Can the executive just stand in there and do anything he wants? Of course the answer is no.”
After a cable news interview, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, retrieved a fresh cup of coffee before making his way back to his office to await his turn to speak. It would be three hours before he returned to the Senate floor, where he would continue to sound the alarm about what he said was a takeover by extremely wealthy billionaires who put no value on government programs.
“I’ve never gotten excited about an OMB nominee in my life, but this guy has an unusual view of his role and the presidency,” Schatz said in an interview as he waited his turn, using the abbreviation for Office of Management and Budget. “We wanted to make sure everybody understands he’s the architect of Project 2025, and he is setting about implementing what they wrote down.”
As the hours ticked by and even the most devoted C-SPAN viewers had likely tuned out, Schatz was joined by Sen. Christopher Murphy, D-Conn. The two volleyed agreeable statements back and forth — but not before briefly discussing their caffeinated beverages of choice. Murphy, who is known for his steadfast appreciation of Diet Mountain Dew, had mentioned earlier in the evening the need for a Red Bull energy drink to carry him through his three-hour time commitment.
But Murphy said he was motivated to speak overnight because the country was facing a “red-alert moment.” He would spend the next two hours laying out why he believed the first 16 days of the Trump administration were “really, really dangerous” and “worthy of an overnight session on the floor of the United States Senate.”
By 5 a.m., 20 Democratic senators had contributed.
Although rare, there is a long tradition of all-night sessions in the Senate, a made-for-TV ritual that usually plays out in a nearly empty chamber. The last time senators worked all night — the Senate Historical Office considers any session continuing until 4 a.m. or later as an all-nighter — was in 2022, when senators worked through dozens of amendments to a budget measure in an hourslong “vote-a-rama.”
Years earlier, during Trump’s first term, Democrats similarly held the Senate floor overnight using all the allotted time to register their opposition to Cabinet nominations.
In 2017, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., held the floor for more than 15 hours protesting the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
On Wednesday, armed with visual aids, Merkley kicked off the Democrats’ lengthy opposition.
“Our constituents, our country and our Constitution are under attack by Donald Trump and Russell Vought,” he said. “Democrats are fighting back.”
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
