That was Ed’s suspicion yesterday as well as the suspicions of, oh, everyone to the right of Bernie Sanders. Booker was going to break with Senate precedent and testify against Sessions, we thought, not because had evidence to submit about Sessions’s views on the law and its enforcement but because he wanted footage for his first campaign commercial in Iowa in 2020 or 2024. Annnnnd that’s exactly what happened. There’s nothing new in the clip below. Booker wanted camera time so that he could emote, badly, about Selma and the arc of moral universe, and to make an impression on the left that his objections to Sessions were so extra woke that he’d go so far as to take unprecedented action — testifying against a Senate colleague — to register them. Watch this poor bastard try and pitifully fail to feign genuine emotion between 6:10 and 6:25, closing his eyes because he’s that much in the moment. I have a high tolerance for Senate grandstanding (I voted for Ted Cruz in the primaries, remember) but even I have my limits. As the saying goes, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at a performance this shameless.

Tom Cotton is laughing too:

.@CoryBooker attacks on Jeff Sessions are so far-fetched I half-expected his make-believe friend T-Bone to be next witness. — Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) January 11, 2017

Ah yes, T-Bone. That’s Booker’s problem in a nutshell: His panders are way, way too obvious. The stench of desperation is overpowering.

If you’re wondering what he’d do about the inconvenient fact that he partnered with Sessions just last year to award the congressional gold medal to civil-rights activists, watch and see. He addresses that up front. In hindsight, it’s too bad that conservative media circulated that clip yesterday. Otherwise he might have forgotten about it, only to have it resurface today after his testimony to totally discredit him. Oh well.