Booker will go to inauguration, but pledges to fight Trump agenda
WASHINGTON — Sen. Cory Booker said Monday he will be attending Donald Trump’s inauguration this week even though he expects to be one of the president-elect’s "most fearsome opponents" in the Senate.
“I respect everybody's choice in this. My personal feeling is this is the peaceful transition of power,” Booker said after speaking at a Martin Luther King Day breakfast organized by the National Action Network, a group led by the Rev. Al Sharpton that hosted a protest march against Trump on Saturday.
“Barack Obama will be up there, handing off the reins of our country and I feel ... it's important for us to be up there. This doesn't mean I agree with Donald Trump,” Booker said.
Several Democratic members of Congress have said they would stay away from the ceremony, including Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, who joined Booker for a widely publicized appearance last week criticizing Trump's pick for attorney general. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a Democrat who was the first African American woman elected to Congress from New Jersey, said Saturday she would hold an interfaith prayer vigil in her hometown of Trenton on Inauguration Day.
“Our nation is founded on democracy and inclusion that unfortunately our president-elect refuses to represent,” Watson Coleman said.
But Booker, a Democrat from Newark who was the state's first African American U.S. senator, pointed to an inaugural tradition stretching back to George Washington’s departure from office.
"I respect our institutions, and so I'll be there just like the president will be there and most of my Senate colleagues," Booker said. "But as soon as that hand goes down and the ceremonies are over, it's time to get to work on advancing our nation's ideals and if Donald Trump wants to repeal our health care, undermine our Justice Department's the critical work they've been doing for the last eight years, if he wants to go after Muslim Americans, immigrant Americans, all these things, I'm going to be fighting to try to stop, to try to make sure we don't see the kind of change or retrenchment or reversals that I worry about."
Booker received national attention when he urged his colleagues last week at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing not to confirm a fellow senator, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, as Trump's attorney general. The testimony broke a Senate tradition in which senators do not appear in committee to oppose colleagues’ appointments to cabinet posts, and fueled speculation Booker is positioning himself for a possible presidential run in 2020.
Sharpton alluded to that at one point during the three-hour breakfast, noting that Barack Obama previously spoke at the breakfast and went on to become president.
"I'm not predicting anything," Sharpton said. "But when I was growing up, we used sing in church, 'I'm so glad trouble doesn't last always' — well, neither will Trump last always."
In his speech to the group, Booker urged the audience to remain focused on the need to fight racial inequities, especially in the way drug crimes are prosecuted.
"We live in a nation with two different justice systems, where a bunch of guys smoking pot at Stanford get a very different treatment from the law as people smoking pot in inner cities. We know in America right now there's no difference of drug use between blacks and whites. But if you're black in America, you will be arrested for it, about 3.7 times more likely to be arrested," he said.
Since taking the Senate oath of office in 2013, Booker has been a leading advocate for criminal justice reform, including a reduction in criminal sentences for drug crimes. He often argues that the war on drugs helps fuel crime and economic despair in urban areas because of disproportionate enforcement and laws that make people with criminal records ineligible for many safety net programs, including food and housing assistance.