Sen. Richard J. Durbin spent more than two decades advising Democratic leaders what to do. But his most important recommendation might have come 20 years ago at Chicago’s Union League when he pulled aside his junior colleague for some advice.
“I’m in a hurry, Dick,” then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) told Durbin, who said it would only take a minute.
“You’ve got to run for president,” Durbin told the future 44th president. “You’re young enough that if you lose, you get another chance. But you’ve got something, buddy, that I’ve never seen in anybody.”
Obama had other people in his ear encouraging him to launch a presidential campaign after not quite two years as a senator, but Durbin was the only senator making that call publicly and privately. Two years later they were back in Chicago and Obama made history with his sweeping 2008 victory.
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Durbin recalled that moment with Obama during a taping of The Washington Sun Cast video podcast that covered a 44-year career spanning a productive 14 years in the House followed by three decades in the Senate.
Advising people at the top became his forte. Durbin, 81, who is retiring in early January, ends his career as the longest serving party whip in Senate history, 22 straight years as the No. 2 leader behind Harry M. Reid (D-Nevada) and Chuck Schumer (D-New York).
He has served on the Senate Judiciary Committee for three decades, including confirmation hearings for eight of the nine Supreme Court justices. The past six years he has served as chair or ranking Democrat on the panel.
And he learned how to navigate around ambitious personalities from his first days in Congress, when a group of nearly 80 incoming House freshmen for the class of 1982 met during orientation.
Those newcomers included a young Reid, future Republican presidential nominee John McCain (R-Arizona), future governors such as Mike DeWine (R-Ohio), John Kasich (R-Ohio) and Bill Richardson (D-New Mexico).
Durbin got elected as the head of the Democratic class, along with his longtime friend and future senator, Barbara Boxer (D-California), while McCain headed up the Republican class.
Now considered a liberal stalwart, Durbin linked arms with moderates in those days to work on issues like balancing the budget. “Tip O’Neill at the time viewed most of us as traitors and kind of kept an eye on us,” he said of the House speaker.
It was a different era when power was consolidated with committee and subcommittee chairs, not in the leadership suites where it resides in today’s Congress. So Durbin’s most passionate cause at the time — fighting smoking after his father died from lung cancer at 53 — ran up against several different power brokers who represented tobacco states or were chain smokers themselves.
His first step was to ban cigarette smoking on flights, against the wishes of Democratic and Republican leaders. “Nobody had beaten big tobacco. But the folks on the other side didn’t count on the fact that the House of Representatives was the largest frequent flyer club in America and they were sick and tired of secondhand smoke,” Durbin recalled.
His final move required getting past the legendary House Rules Committee chair, Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Florida), who shocked the young Durbin by ruling his amendment into a package that went to the House floor.
Pepper privately explained afterward that his greatest accomplishment was creating the National Cancer Institute and he would join Durbin in his battle. The tobacco industry has been on the run ever since.
“When I took this issue on, 29% of high school students in America smoked tobacco cigarettes — 29%! Today it’s 2%. This has changed the world,” Durbin said.
After Bill Clinton won the 1992 presidential campaign and plucked Leon Panetta (D-California) out of the House to become budget director, Rep. George Miller (D-California) needed a new roommate to fill out his townhouse that had become a hub for rising star Democrats. Durbin got tapped, joining Schumer for about two decades of roommate status and periodic jockeying over who would win which leadership post.
In 1996 Durbin’s mentor, Paul Simon (D-Illinois), retired from the Senate. Durbin jumped into a crowded primary and blew away the field, eventually winning the general election by almost 16 points.
He won the next four reelection battles by double-digit margins, helping cement Illinois’ reputation as a Democratic stronghold.
His greatest honor, yet his greatest disappointment, came on the DREAM Act, legislation he crafted 25 years ago to grant permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants brought here as young children who then grew up in the United States.
A few Democrats and almost all Republicans voted to block consideration of the legislation in December 2010, when dozens of Dreamers had filled the public gallery hoping for the act’s passage. He told them later that day that he would not give up, and Obama did sign an executive order implementing parts of his law. Durbin will pass that torch to several younger Democrats when he leaves in January.
Far from the House moderate of the 1980s, in the Senate, Durbin gained a quick reputation as a liberal who could be a sharp partisan when he felt the need, particularly on the Judiciary Committee. The confirmation battles over judges in the late Clinton years and the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency set the stage for rules changes that would be implemented by Reid and future Republican majority leaders, using the “nuclear option” to ease filibuster constraints.
Not long before the former majority leader died five years ago, Durbin said he and Reid spoke about their decision to take the first party-line step to break filibuster constraints in 2013.
“He was warned ahead of time there would be retribution. It all occurred and we’re still suffering from that. Harry, before he passed away, he and I talked about it. He said the Senate will never be the same,” Durbin said, adding that Reid felt “he had no choice” but to do it.
He’s careful not to tell his current colleagues what they should do in the future. But he’s not very supportive of trying to further blow up the institutional guardrails in order to do things now demanded by the party’s most liberal faithful, such as expanding the Supreme Court.
If he were chairing the Judiciary Committee next year and President Donald Trump had the chance to nominate a new justice, Durbin seems inclined to not block the nominee the way Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) blocked the 2016 nomination of Merrick Garland.
At least hold a hearing, he thinks, and vote the nominee down.
Durbin’s biggest complaint, one that would take an uprising from rank-and-file on both sides of the aisle to fix, is that too much power has been concentrated in the “four corners, whatever you want to call it.”
That’s the House speaker, House minority leader, Senate majority leader and Senate minority leader, who often at the end of a legislative session make calls about what legislation gets tacked on to some must-pass bill.
Part of the problem comes from rank-and-file lawmakers in both chambers afraid of their political shadows asking party leaders to save them from having to take tough votes on amendments, leading to a bottled-up process.
“The notion that the next vote’s gonna cost you the next election is an exaggeration,” Durbin said. “I’ve cast 17,000 votes in the House and the Senate. I decided a long time ago I got plenty of votes for anybody to hang me with if they wish.”
But it’s also a function of power-hungry party leaders. “It’s no longer up to the body on the floor, it’s up to a handful of leaders in rooms that I don’t have access to,” he said.
How does the second-in-command not have access to those decisions?
“It’s a great piece of real estate,” he said of an office that for 22 years sat directly above Reid and Schumer’s in the northwest wing of the Capitol.
Durbin said that his decision to retire came from his “degree in geriatrics,” watching several colleagues over the years stick around too long.
He’s ready to retire without any real regrets.
“There reaches a point when you’re just not as on the ball as you once were. I did not want to reach that point and be in the middle of a Senate term,” he said. “I wanted to walk out the front door of this great institution rather than be carried out the back.”
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