Cory Booker’s stunts reveal the sad state of the Democratic Party

Sen. Cory Booker’s latest stunt offered yet another eye-opener about the Democratic Party’s current dead-endism.

Booker went bananas on the Senate floor Tuesday, demanding that Democrats join him in voting NO — on a bipartisan bill — to supposedly prove that they aren’t “bending the knee” to Donald Trump. 

That is, it was a “grand gesture” utterly unrelated to the cause he claimed to be serving.

Booker almost made Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) cry when he thundered that the humdrum package of bills (to improve police staffing and give cops more access to mental-health treatment) would represent “complicity with an authoritarian leader.” 

These bills — which, as Klobuchar pointed out, passed unanimously out of a committee Booker sits on — were classic feel-good, no-brainer legislation.  

But Spartacus 2.0 still paced the Senate floor like a caged Colosseum lion, shouting, “Don’t question my integrity!” when Klobuchar noted that Booker had actually skipped the hearing at which he could have raised any objections. 

Why not question his integrity, or at least his devotion to actually stopping a bill he was treating as the essence of Trumpism?

This isn’t the first time kooky Cory has gone in big on empty performance art.

In July, he staged a walkout during Emil Bove’s judicial confirmation hearing — as if his absence would change anything.   

Then there was his record-breaking 25-hour “filibuster,” without any actual bill on the floor to filibuster against.  

This posturing isn’t new for Booker: As a lowly Newark city councilman, he years ago went on a 10-day hunger strike — in a tent, no less — to “protest crime.” (It’s safe to say that this awakened not a single criminal’s conscience, nor anyone else’s.)

Senator Stuntman is plainly gearing up for another presidential run. “The Democratic Party needs a wake-up call!” he thundered amid Tuesday’s tantrum, practically begging for activists to make the moment viral.

The sad part is that Booker’s antics are only a bit cheesier than other Democrats’ performative “resistance,” whether it’s sit-ins at ICE facilities, kumbaya-style teach-ins on the steps of the Capitol, holding up grumpy signs at the State of the Union address, or filming cringy TikToks. 

It’s not simply that Democrats are out of power, but that they’re out of ideas (unless you count unpopular ones).  

Which leaves Booker and all the rest desperately trying to feign passion about . . . absolutely nothing.