Cory Booker Tells Reporters He Hasn’t Eaten or Drank Water in Days: ‘Intentionally Dehydrated Himself’

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Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) told reporters on Tuesday that he hadn’t eaten anything or drank water in days after speaking on the Senate floor for a record 25 hours.

“Cory Booker tells a group of us he didn’t have to go to the restroom over 25 hours because he hasn’t eaten since Friday and stopped drinking water Sunday. He said he intentionally dehydrated himself,” reported CNN chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju on Tuesday evening after Booker filibustered on the Senate floor for 25 hours.

According to Raju, Booker told reporters:

I fasted for days into it, I stopped drinking water a long time ago. I think that had good and bad benefits; I definitely started cramping up from lack of water. So if some of you saw me really drink nothing at the end, that was just trying… to stop my muscles from cramping.

I think I stopped eating on Friday, and then to stop drinking the night before I started on Monday. And that had its benefits and it had its really downsides. And so instead of figuring out how to go bathroom, I ended up, I think really, unfortunately, dehydrating myself.

While filibusters are typically employed by members of Congress to delay or derail a decision, Booker delivered his 25-hour speech as part of a vague protest against President Donald Trump and as part of an attempt to break the record for the longest Senate speech.

“To be candid, Strom Thurmond’s record always kind of just really irked me,” Booker told MSNBC. “That he would be the longest speech, that the longest speech on our great Senate floor was someone who was trying to stop people like me from being in the Senate. So to surpass that was something I didn’t know if we could do, but it was something that was really, once we got closer, became more and more important to me.”

Thurmond previously held the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history after speaking for more than 24 hours in 1957 to prevent the Civil Rights Act.