The written testimony had said: Iran's nuclear program has been obliterated. The intelligence community assesses that there have been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. Those were the words Tulsi Gabbard had submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in advance of the March 18th hearing, in accordance with the committee's standard procedure for written testimony that members receive before an open session. Those same words did n

She had said it on January 7th, 2019, four days after she was sworn into the United States House of Representatives on an English-language translation of the Quran, four days after she had stood in the well of the House in a thawb, the traditional Palestinian embroidered dress her mother had worn, and taken the oath that every member of Congress takes, the oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic. Four days afte

The speech had lasted twenty-five hours and five minutes. It had begun on the evening of March 31st, 2025, and it had ended on the morning of April 1st, and it had set the record for the longest floor speech in the history of the United States Senate, surpassing the record set by Strom Thurmond's 1957 filibuster of the Civil Rights Act, a comparison that Booker had made deliberately and in full consciousness of its symbolic weight, because the invocation of Thurmond in the co