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Oregon's Democratic senator, Jeff Merkley, has reached the 16th hour of a lengthy floor address on the Senate chamber, arguing that President Trump is acting as an authoritarian, including by deploying armed forces into his hometown of the city of Portland.

The 68-year-old senator, began speaking around 6.20pm on Tuesday and persisted with minimal breaks into the early hours of Wednesday. Positioned on the chamber floor alongside signs that read “authoritarianism is here now!” and “the President is breaking legal norms”, the senator has paused only to respond to inquiries from other Democratic lawmakers.

“I’ve come to the Senate floor tonight to ring the alarm bells. We’re in the most perilous moment, the most significant danger to our nation since the Civil War. President Trump is shredding our constitution,” Merkley said as he began his speech.

The senator addressed the chamber a day after an appellate court had allowed the president to send the state guard into Portland over the objections of city officials, who assert there is no merit to the administration's assertion that the city is a “battlefield”. Trump has also directed a comparable dispatch of troops into the city of Chicago, where federal agents are conducting a severe clampdown focusing on people they believe to be undocumented immigrants. The supreme court is set to review a legal challenge to that move.

Military Actions and Political Reprisals

The senator touched on those deployments to cities that are predominantly liberal, as well as other instances where the commander-in-chief is seen as striking back at his opponents, such as the charges a handpicked US attorney has filed against the New York state attorney general, Attorney General James, and former FBI director James Comey.

“Fair treatment before the law – that’s the vision here in America. Not unequal injustice, which is what the president is pursuing by taking the power of the government and targeting persons that he dislikes or views as political opponents,” the senator said.

“Such actions are typical of distant dictatorships, and one thinks, that would never happen in the United States of America, yet it is unfolding presently.”

Historical Context and Precedents

Merkley’s speech is the second occurrence this year in which a senator from the Democratic side has staged a lengthy floor speech to censure Trump’s policies. About two months after Trump’s inauguration, Cory Booker of New Jersey addressed the chamber for 25 hours and five minutes, setting a new record for the lengthiest address ever by a solo senator.

Merkley has yielded questions from a handful of Democratic colleagues, among them Dick Durbin of Illinois, Representative Kim of New Jersey, and Booker, who warned: “We are witnessing an era that unless we sound the warning, increasing numbers of citizens will be hurt by a national leader who is behaving similarly to an authoritarian leader than a democratically chosen official.”

Government Shutdown Context

Merkley’s speech come on the 22nd day of the federal funding lapse that began at the beginning of October, when Democrats and Republicans could not reach consensus on legislation to continue financing beyond the end of September.

The upper chamber has held 11 failed ballots on a Republican-backed bill to extend funding through November 21, which the Democratic bloc have rejected because it does not include medical care financing that they are demanding, as well as restrictions on Trump’s use of rescissions to slash funding approved by Congress.

The Senate’s Republican leaders were scheduled to conduct a 12th vote on the bill on Wednesday.