Much like with being "apolitical", doing nothing IS something.
Like I said. The actual act seems to have had no purpose to begin with other than MAYBE trolling or making photo ops. Anyone who would actually be paying attention to cspan or Rupar already knows we have an authoritarian government and anyone who doesn't isn't going to hear about this. And the audience was the US Senate republicans who ARE the problem.
In terms of impact? This wasn't that dissimilar from MTG screaming shit from the back row while Biden spoke or boebert giving a thumbs down to the cameras. It doesn't change minds and is just campaigning to your base. Which... I don't know Oregon's political tendencies off the top of my head so maybe that was the point. But it's not going to change anything and is sure as hell not "speaking to power" or whatever that person wanted to pretend it was.
Now let's look at repercussions. Because every action has a reaction. We have a government that shut down and a rapist actively destroying the White House during said shut down. We have a Senate that refuses to even consider an amended budget (in large part because there is zero chance the House will do so since it would involve triggering the Epstein files...). And what did we give the republicans in return?
Democrats hold Senate hostage and waste time ranting about their trump derangement syndrome when we should be working together to re-open the government and get our cleanly shaved white men in the military paid!
And a complicit news media will just say "So you are denying that Senator Merkley spent 23 hours complaining about president trump during a shutdown?".
To be clear: my inner troll still thinks this is funny and it can't be THAT much worse than what is going on (see: complicit news media).
But before you and anyone else ever start to say "something is better than nothing, no matter how ineffective and arguably detrimental to our efforts", let me leave you with
Was THAT at all a good idea? Are you going to defend fucking THAT?