Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) totally melted down at fellow Democrats on the Senate floor Tuesday.
He got in a heated confrontation with Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), before accusing members of his own party of aiding President Donald Trump by failing to hold the line.
Booker denounced what he saw as partisan complicity within his party. He argued Democrats were letting Trump sidestep the Constitution by not standing up to the administration’s decision to freeze federal funding to Democratic strongholds.
“This, to me, is a problem with Democrats in America right now,” he said. “We’re willing to be complicit to Donald Trump.”
🚨 HOLY HELL; Sen. Cory Booker just detonated on the Senate floor.
Screaming match. Finger-pointing. Full-on political exorcism.
He torched his own party for being “WEAK,” said they “MIGHT DESERVE TO LOSE,” and warned Democrats:
“If you’re looking the other way from Trump’s… pic.twitter.com/oDzaVyB3LR
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) July 29, 2025
Booker claimed the party needed to use its influence over legislation funding police departments to pressure Trump into unfreezing the grants.
He argued that his colleagues were turning a blind eye while blue states were punished by the White House.
The dispute began when Cortez Masto attempted to fast-track a legislative package that included nationwide police grants via unanimous consent.
Booker objected, arguing the legislation would ultimately benefit only red states, due to Trump’s funding blockade against Democratic-led jurisdictions.
He reminded fellow senators they had leverage and questioned why they were rushing to pass the bills under current conditions.
He said some in his party were acting as though they were elected to serve only their own states while ignoring what he claimed were constitutional violations by the president.
“Don’t be complicit to the president of the United States,” Booker said, accusing Trump of eviscerating the Constitution by hand-picking which states receive funding in defiance of congressional intent.
Klobuchar responded by pointing out that Booker had previously opposed her policing legislation well before Trump retook the White House.
She said his objections predate the current administration and were part of a longer-standing disagreement.
She noted that the bills had passed the Judiciary Committee weeks earlier, and jabbed at Booker for missing the markup.
“I can’t help it if someone couldn’t change their schedule to be there,” Klobuchar said, highlighting that Booker had not offered amendments when he had the opportunity.
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The remark clearly irritated Booker, who pushed back hard. He said he had supported multiple bills for law enforcement and didn’t need a lecture on “urgency.”
He cited the death of a close friend, a police officer in a small New Jersey town who died by suicide, as a reason for his commitment to policing issues.
He then pivoted to blasting Democrats, elite law firms, universities, and corporations for failing to resist Trump’s pressure.
Booker criticized institutions that once stood for free speech and constitutional values but now, in his view, were bending to the administration’s will.
Booker questioned why law firms were hesitant to take controversial clients and why colleges that claim to value free expression were surrendering to political pressure.
He brought up a recent $221 million settlement by Columbia University with the Trump administration, implying it was a capitulation to avoid sanctions.
“This is a call, folks. This is a wake-up call,” Booker spat. “Why are you bending the knee?”
Booker slammed Senate Democrats for attempting to push through the police funding package knowing it would exclude blue states.
He said doing so amounted to aiding a “totalitarian leader” and called on colleagues to stand firm.
“What are the very people here elected to defend the Constitution of the United States saying?” he asked.
“Oh, well, today, let’s look the other way and pass some resources that won’t go to Connecticut, that won’t go to Illinois, that won’t go to New York, that will go to the states that [the president] likes.”
Cortez Masto later rejected Booker’s criticisms, stating the bills had bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee, where Booker also serves, and he never voiced opposition at the time.
She accused him of attempting to torpedo the legislation at the last minute.
“It clearly was … what he was trying to do is kill all these bills. And it’s unfortunate, because these are bills that support law enforcement,” she said.
Cortez Masto argued the bills would help police across the country keep communities safe and insisted that Democrats should be standing with law enforcement.
She called Booker’s criticism of his colleagues disappointing, pointing out that she had personally led the Democratic Senate campaign effort against Trump during the 2020 cycle.
Meanwhile, a former top official from the Biden administration weighed in on the broader direction of the Democratic Party.
Speaking to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” the former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg criticized Democrats for being too slow to adapt and too attached to a broken status quo.
“Democrats have been slow to understand the changes in how people get their information,” he said.
He warned the party had failed to recognize shifting cultural dynamics and said the real danger was in clinging to systems that no longer work.
“Right now, you’ve got an administration that is burning down many of the institutions that we have in this country,” he added.
“It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was,” Buttigieg concluded.
“If our politics, our economy and our culture were healthy, the rise of a figure like Donald Trump would have never happened in the first place.”
Watch Buttigieg’s full interview here:
Done for Comedy right
It’s pretty rich to hear Booker acting so concerned about the Constitution when his party spent four years ignoring the laws that protect the border, and weaponizing the DOJ, FBI, and CIA against their political enemies. Physician, heal thyself.