WASHINGTON – Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, held the Senate floor all night long Tuesday and into Wednesday afternoon, giving a marathon speech to disrupt legislative business and protest the Trump administration's policies as lawmakers struggle to reopen the federal government.

As of 3 p.m., the nearly 69-year-old senator had been talking for over 20 hours. He began speaking at 6:21 the prior evening.

Merkley said his long-running speech was an effort to sound the alarm on both the government shutdown and President Donald Trump, in his view, dragging the country "further into authoritarianism."

"Trump's plan is to replace government by and for the people with government by and for the powerful," he said at one point.

"This is an incredible threat to our nation, to the entire vision of our Constitution," he said at another point. "I don't believe there's a single senator here in the United States Senate who wants to see freedom crushed and authoritarian rule established here in the United States of America ... Our founders did not want the president to be a king."

Merkley's talk-a-thon comes as Democrats have become increasingly willing to resort to drastic measures to exert what relatively little political leverage they have in Congress over Republicans. The government shutdown, which is largely rooted in Democrats' demands over health care policy and the refusal of GOP leaders to negotiate over those requests while on a funding deadline, has now become the second longest in U.S. history.

Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, went viral earlier this year after he gave the longest-ever speech on the Senate floor, which lasted 25 hours. Booker, who also was speaking out against the Trump administration, broke the record set by segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond in 1957.

Prior to Wednesday, Merkley's own longest speech on the Senate floor was in 2017, lasting 15 hours and 27 minutes.

He isn't totally alone up there; he's received help from other Democratic lawmakers, who've asked him questions and interjected intermittently to give him brief breaks. By early Wednesday afternoon, the senator had hit a second wind, though he seemed to be feeling the physical effects of standing indefinitely at points during the wee hours of the night.

"I want to untie my shoelace because standing in one place for this much time, well, made my shoes a little tight," Merkley said at 2:45 a.m. "That feels a little better. I don't recommend standing through the night and talking. Not a healthy pursuit."

Zachary Schermele is a congressional reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @ZachSchermele and Bluesky at @zachschermele.bsky.social.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Oregon Democrat speaks on the Senate floor all night long to protest Trump

Reporting by Zachary Schermele, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect