The senior senator from Illinois is Dick Durbin, a Democrat first elected to the House in 1982 and to the Senate in 1996. He is the Democratic whip and assistant majority leader, making him the second most powerful senator after Majority Leader Harry Reid. Durbin grew up in East St. Louis, the youngest of three brothers. His father, a railroad night watchman, died of lung cancer when Durbin was 14. He graduated from Georgetown University and its law school, and then returned to Illinois with an ambition for politics. He joined Democrat Paul Simon’s staff when Simon was the lieutenant governor (1969-73), then was a state Senate staffer in the 1970s. Durbin lost races for the state Senate in 1976 and for lieutenant governor in 1978. But in 1982 he won the nomination to oppose Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Findley, who had characterized himself as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s best friend in Congress. Durbin had no trouble raising money from well-heeled Israel supporters. Durbin won the race. Read More

The senior senator from Illinois is Dick Durbin, a Democrat first elected to the House in 1982 and to the Senate in 1996. He is the Democratic whip and assistant majority leader, making him the second most powerful senator after Majority Leader Harry Reid. Durbin grew up in East St. Louis, the youngest of three brothers. His father, a railroad night watchman, died of lung cancer when Durbin was 14. He graduated from Georgetown University and its law school, and then returned to Illinois with an ambition for politics. He joined Democrat Paul Simon’s staff when Simon was the lieutenant governor (1969-73), then was a state Senate staffer in the 1970s. Durbin lost races for the state Senate in 1976 and for lieutenant governor in 1978. But in 1982 he won the nomination to oppose Republican U.S. Rep. Paul Findley, who had characterized himself as Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s best friend in Congress. Durbin had no trouble raising money from well-heeled Israel supporters. Durbin won the race.

In the House, he got a seat on the Appropriations Committee, where in 1993, he became chairman of the Agriculture subcommittee. Durbin’s centerpiece legislation in the House was the 1988 ban on smoking on domestic airline flights, a battle inspired by the death of his chain-smoking father. He followed that up by trying to limit tobacco subsidies and to give the Food and Drug Administration authority to regulate tobacco as a health hazard—both accomplished after years of effort. “I didn’t realize it would trigger a change in America,” he later said of the airline smoking ban, but indeed it led to smoking bans in many more settings. After his onetime boss Paul Simon announced his retirement from the Senate in 1996, Durbin ran for the seat. Raising more than $1 million, he outspent former state Treasurer (now governor) Pat Quinn in the March 1996 primary and won 65%-30%. In the general, he faced trial lawyer and abortion opponent Al Salvi and won 56%-41%.

In the Senate, Durbin has compiled a largely liberal voting record, though he supported welfare reform in the 1990s and has always supported the death penalty. While in the House, Durbin favored restrictions on abortion, but has opposed most legislation to restrict abortion since coming to the Senate. (In 2004, the Catholic priest at his home church in Springfield said that he wouldn’t give him communion as a consequence of his position.) On other domestic issues, Durbin has had a strong pro-union voting record, but split with labor on trade, supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement and normal trade relations with China: Illinois is a big exporter. But in 2006 Durbin said he felt “betrayed” by the results of NAFTA and has opposed more recent trade agreements. In 2001, Democratic Leader Tom Daschle appointed Durbin assistant floor leader. After Daschle’s defeat in 2004 and the elevation of Reid as minority leader, Durbin became minority whip, and then majority whip in 2007, after Democrats won their Senate majority.

On the Judiciary Committee, Durbin strongly opposed many Bush administration judicial nominees, including John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and strongly supported Obama administration nominees, including Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. In July 2010, after listening to Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s speech supporting Kagan’s nomination, Durbin said, “I reflected on some of the things that I have said and how I have voted in the past, and thought that perhaps his statement suggested a better course.”

In 2003, Durbin was the Democrats’ point man on efforts to limit damages in medical malpractice lawsuits, and he successfully blocked action on the legislation. He also took a lead role on asbestos legislation that year. He negotiated with Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, on a bill that established quick recovery for injured plaintiffs and reduced the burden on businesses only tangentially connected with asbestos. But the two failed to produce a compromise bill. In 2006, he helped defeat the asbestos trust fund sponsored by Pennsylvania Republican Arlen Specter, which would have replaced a multitude of lawsuits against the asbestos industry with a $140 billion trust fund to compensate victims. Durbin strongly opposed taking the matter out of the courts, although he conceded the need for “significant changes in the existing tort system.”

In 2007, Durbin was also the chief sponsor of the DREAM Act, a bill to allow high school graduates who are illegal immigrants to go to U.S. colleges. He was unable to get a filibuster-proof majority for the bill, however, and the bill failed in December 2010. In September 2008, when the Senate was considering the $700-billion rescue of the financial industry, Durbin voted in favor though he expressed reservations, saying, “I’m not sure what the right thing is.” In 2008 and 2009, as the housing crisis deepened, Durbin pushed for his “cram-down” bill allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of distressed mortgages on primary residences in bankruptcy cases. The Senate voted 51-45 against the bill, with 12 Democrats joining all the Republicans—the first big loss by Democrats in the 111th Congress. When the Senate was considering the financial regulation bill in May 2010, Durbin worked with his colleagues on a successful amendment giving the Federal Reserve authority to reduce the fees banks charge merchants for processing debit card transactions.

Durbin voted against the Gulf War resolution in 1991 and the Iraq war resolution in 2002, though he supported the use of force in Iraq under President Clinton in February 1998. In 2005, Durbin was at the center of a storm over remarks he made from the Senate floor concerning detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Citing an FBI report that described the mistreatment of some prisoners, Durbin likened the American interrogators to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings.” His comments dominated the news for days. Durbin at first said he regretted the misunderstanding of his remarks, but after then-Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley criticized them, he issued an emotional apology from the Senate floor. In 2007, he voted with 92 other senators for a resolution opposing the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the continental United States. But he supported the Obama administration’s policy of closing Guantanamo and supported transfer of detainees to the former state prison in Thomson, Ill.

Durbin was voted the most admired senator in National Journal’s poll of Democratic congressional insiders in late 2009. And as whip, he has worked hard on the floor to advance Democratic bills. He gave up a Judiciary subcommittee chairmanship to Arlen Specter when Specter switched parties in April 2009. In early 2010, Durbin worked with then-Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., to put together a Democratic jobs bill—an effort frustrated by the election of Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown—and he led the push against Kentucky Republican Jim Bunning’s filibuster of extended unemployment benefits.

Nonetheless, there were signs of tension with his Democratic colleague Chuck Schumer of New York, who was elevated to a newly created No. 3 leadership position after his successes in ensuring a Democratic majority in 2006 and 2008, when he ran the Senate Democrats’ election committee. In 2009 and 2010, when it seemed likely or at least possible that Harry Reid would be defeated in a tough re-election contest in Nevada, there was speculation that Durbin and Schumer would both seek to succeed Reid. Widely admired for his liberal convictions, Durbin has had less contact with the Washington lobbying community than Schumer has, and while much more active on the floor, he is seen in some quarters as more ingenuous. As one longtime Democratic staffer told Politico, “He’s a great guy. But he thinks with his heart, not his head. He’s great at communicating ideas, but not at thinking strategically.”

Durbin’s leadership position enables him to work effectively on local issues. He has had a hand in securing funding for the Metra and CTA mass transit systems in the Chicago region, for Mississippi River locks and dams, and for O’Hare Airport expansion. He has worked for ethanol tax incentives and pushed for an ethanol research pilot plant at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. On the Appropriations Committee, he keeps an eye out for Chicago’s commodities exchanges, opposing new fees on the exchanges and in 2008, working behind the scenes to soften the impact of proposed controls on speculators in the oil futures market as gas prices soared. Durbin is also a champion of the $4.6 billion FutureGen clean-coal project in Mattoon, which critics have derided as “the biggest earmark in history.” The Bush Energy Department declined to build FutureGen, but Durbin renewed the push in 2009 with the more supportive Obama administration. When it comes to his home state, he’s also loyal. After former Illinois Republican Gov. George Ryan was imprisoned for racketeering and fraud, Durbin, who had worked with Ryan on projects for the state, urged President George W. Bush to pardon him in 2008.

In a backdrop of many clashing egos in the Senate, many senators have tense relationships with home-state colleagues, but Durbin had a warm relationship with Obama after he was elected in 2004. Rather than chafing at Obama’s quick rise and celebrity, Durbin in 2006 urged him to run for president. He endorsed Obama when he announced his candidacy in February 2007. When Obama was elected, Durbin said, “To have a president of the United States who is a close, personal friend and has the opportunity to lead this nation and change the world is a dream come true for me in public life.” Obama has called Durbin “a terrific partner.” (Durbin did not join Obama at the election night celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park because his 40-year-old daughter had died three days before.)

By contrast, Durbin did not have a close relationship with former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was driven from office after he was wiretapped saying he expected to profit either personally or politically from his power to appoint a Senate successor after Obama was elected president in 2008. Before he was impeached, Blagojevich denied wrongdoing and went ahead and appointed former Illinois Attorney General Roland Burris to the Senate in December 2008. Durbin encouraged Burris not to accept, and then raised the possibility the Senate would refuse to seat him. In February 2009, when it was reported that Burris had had more contacts with Blagojevich’s brother than he had earlier indicated, Durbin advised Burris to resign, but then drew back after Rep. Bobby Rush, an African-American Democrat from Chicago, suggested Burris was being treated badly because of his race. Durbin then encouraged state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias to run. In February 2010, Giannoulias kicked off his campaign at Durbin’s Springfield home, although he ultimately lost the election to Republican Mark Kirk.

Durbin was mentioned briefly in 2000 as a possible vice presidential nominee, but he ultimately withdrew his name from consideration. In 2004, he was not much mentioned as a vice presidential nominee and played only a small role at the Democratic National Convention. In his 2008 re-election campaign, Durbin was opposed by physician Steven Sauerberg, who loaned his campaign $1.7 million and spent only $1 million, while Durbin spent $13 million. Sauerberg criticized Durbin for his 2005 “Nazis” statement, but the issue proved to have little traction. Durbin won 68%-29%.