When Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen,
perhaps President George W. Bush’s most corporately compromised
judicial nominee, appeared early in 2003 before the Senate Judiciary
Committee, the most devastating line of questioning she faced did not come
from one of the big-name inquisitors on a committee that includes a
Kennedy, a Biden, and a Leahy. Rather, Owen was taken down by a
mild-mannered Midwesterner with a flair for discovering and exploiting the
weaknesses of the Bush administration and its judicial nominees.
Could Owen identify any opinion she had ever written,
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., inquired, “that was politically
unpopular with the established power structure in Texas?” As Owen
first asked Durbin to explain what he meant by “established power
structure,” and then stumbled through a nonanswer that ended with her
grumbling about political correctness, you could hear the wheels falling
off the bandwagon the administration had tried to create to win approval
for their nominee. Even conservative Democratic senators recognized that
they were dealing with a conservative judicial activist whose elevation to
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit would pose a genuine threat
to justice in the Deep South and joined a filibuster that ultimately led to
the withdrawal of Owen’s nomination.
How did Durbin know that Owen could not answer even
the most basic questions about her subservience to political and economic
special interests? Because, to a greater extent than any other senator, he
has taken seriously the fight against Bush’s most troubling judicial
picks: carefully targeting the worst of them, mastering their records and
developing lines of questioning meant to illustrate to other Democrats the
necessity of rejecting them. “He doesn’t just try to score
points,” says Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, the
coalition of progressive groups that has been at the forefront of
challenges to the Bush administration’s strategy for reshaping the
nation’s courts. “He zeroes in on the issues that matter most
and then he just starts demanding answers.”
For the most part, Durbin’s filleting of
Bush’s judicial nominees has been an obscure pleasure enjoyed mainly
by Washington liberal activists who monitor the progress of judicial
nominations. But that’s about to change. When the 109th Congress
begins to address the Bush agenda in coming days, Durbin — an
unassuming 60-year-old everyman with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a
willingness to share the spotlight, and a penchant for skipping Washington
parties to return to his hometown of Springfield — is quickly
emerging as the most aggressive and progressive member of the Senate
Democratic leadership. Durbin has challenged the Bush administration on
everything from judicial nominations to flu vaccine to torture at Abu
Ghraib. He has hit the ground running with votes against attorney-general
nominee Alberto Gonzales and secretary-of-state nominee Condoleezza Rice.
And there is every indication that he intends to show congressional
Democrats how to be something they have not been since Bush assumed the
presidency: an effective opposition.
Those who have followed
Durbin’s 22-year career as a member of the House and Senate argue
with confidence that his election as Senate Democratic whip, the
second-highest-ranking position in the caucus, was one of the few bright
spots in the dark days following the 2004 election debacle. “If you
believe in progressive politics, you have to be excited that Durbin’s
where he is,” says David Axelrod, a veteran Democratic consultant who
has run a number of Senate races and last year managed John Edwards’
presidential campaign.
The Nov. 2 defeat of Minority Leader Tom Daschle
opened the way for a long-needed reshuffling of the Democratic
Party’s leadership in the upper chamber. Yet the move of
Daschle’s lieutenant, Nevadan Harry Reid, into the minority leader
position inspired little excitement; Reid is scrappier than Daschle, but
his centrist tendencies, particularly on hot-button issues such as
reproductive rights and gun control, have always marked him more as a
manager than as a marauder. The rise of Durbin holds out the prospect of
the something extra that Democrats have been missing: an edgy willingness
to battle the powers that be, not just in the Senate but in the court of
public opinion. “It’s not an accident that Durbin is the whip.
I don’t think he’s been elevated to be a mute,” adds
Axelrod, who has known the Illinois senator since the late 1970s.
“Harry Reid is a more reticent player. Because Reid is who he is, it
was incumbent on the party to have an advocate in leadership, and
that’s Dick.”
Durbin is not, however, a maverick. Though he has one
of the most liberal voting records in the Senate, he sees himself as very
much in the mainstream of his party. But he recognizes something that too
many party leaders in both houses have had a hard time wrapping their heads
around since the 1994 election handed power to the Republicans: The
mainstream of his party is not currently the mainstream of Congress.
Democrats must therefore stop thinking of themselves as the natural party
of government and start operating as an opposition force — picking
the right fights, remaining united in their dissents, and establishing a
record on the most critical issues of the day that is distinct from that of
the White House and the House and Senate majorities. “We have to have
our own agenda,” says Durbin, who has already begun meeting with Reid
and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to shape a clearer Democratic line.
Yes, Democrats suffered a serious setback in the 2004 elections —
they now hold just 44 seats in the Senate. (Independent Jim Jeffords
caucuses with the group to create a 55-45 partisan split.) But Durbin does
not see his party’s diminished position as an excuse for a compromise
of ideals; in fact, he says, “we Democrats can’t take this
sitting down. We have to stand up, look at our own agenda, our own language
and figure out how we build this back into a majority party.”
Durbin is ready for that fight. The new whip is a man
of government, so much so that he once served as the parliamentarian for
Democrats in the Illinois Legislature. Since arriving in Washington in 1983
as a young congressman representing the district that once sent Abraham
Lincoln to the House, Durbin has mastered the protocols of Capitol Hill.
But he also knows how to trump the Republicans in the battle of public
opinion. Last fall, before the extent of the nationwide flu vaccine
shortage was fully revealed to the American people, Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist sent a letter to senators urging them to get inoculated. Durbin
responded with a show of populist fury that would have well served
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, who never quite figured out how
to capitalize on a public-health crisis that had occurred on his
opponent’s watch. “It simply isn’t fair for senators to
cut to the front of the line when seniors around the country have been
forced to wait for hours to get a flu shot,” raged Durbin, who turned
down the proffered shot and then dispatched a letter to Health and Human
Services Secretary Tommy Thompson demanding to know “whether or not
officials in our government knew that problems were coming and did little
or nothing to prevent them.”
Durbin learned how to play to win in one of the
nation’s most savage political settings. Born and raised in southern
Illinois by parents who were active trade unionists, he has spent a
lifetime in the rough-and-tumble world of Illinois Democratic politics,
where generations of idealists have been ground up by the Daley
family’s Chicago machine. But Durbin attached himself early on to two
idealists who proved tougher than the machine: liberal icon Paul Douglas
and the man who would eventually occupy Douglas’s seat in the Senate,
Paul Simon, the bow-tied battler for civil rights and civil liberties.
Durbin describes the late Simon as “my closest friend in political
life.”
“If you want to know where Dick Durbin is coming
from, you have to understand his connections to Paul Douglas and Paul
Simon, which I think taught him that you don’t need to put your
finger in the wind every time an issue comes up,” says Dawn Clark
Netsch, a former Illinois legislator and gubernatorial candidate.
“Dick learned that you can have good political instincts and still
have principles. In fact, he learned that you have to have good political
instincts if you’re going to stand on principle and win.”
More than anyone else, Simon paved the way for Durbin
in politics, ultimately tapping his former aide to inherit Simon’s
Senate seat in 1996. Simon knew Durbin was ready. During his previous seven
terms in the U.S. House, Durbin had led fights to scrap funding for the
Strategic Defense Initiative, to defend funding for the Women, Infants, and
Children nutrition program, and to ban smoking on planes (Durbin, who was
14 when his father died of lung cancer, has fought what Congressional Quarterly describes
as a “relentless campaign against the tobacco industry”).
Durbin was not always a perfect progressive. Though he now gets 100 percent
ratings from Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America, he started in
politics as a foe of abortion rights. And his first House race, in 1982,
benefited from a dramatic infusion of pro-Israel money that helped him
depose former Republican Rep. Paul Findley, a thoughtful critic of Israeli
policies who wanted the United States to develop better relations with the
Palestine Liberation Organization.
There was a time when liberals in Illinois and beyond
saw Durbin as someone who played the game of politics a little too well.
But, says Arab American Institute president Jim Zogby, Durbin’s
record in Congress has won over doubters. “For my part, I’ve
always looked at Durbin as a progressive Democrat, but he has really
emerged in that regard in recent years,” says Zogby. “In
particular, his commitment to civil liberties has been
extraordinary.”
Though Durbin cast an unwise vote for the USA Patriot
Act in the fall of 2001, he soon emerged as one of the Senate’s most
outspoken critics of that legislation’s excesses. Zogby says that
Durbin stands out as one of Congress’s most ardent battlers against
racial and ethnic profiling, a stance for which he has earned high praise
from the American Civil Liberties Union. And as the Abu Ghraib scandal blew
up, it was Durbin who introduced an amendment to the 2005
defense-authorization bill reaffirming the U.S. ban on torture. More
recently, during the Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings on the
nomination of Alberto Gonzales to serve as attorney general, Durbin grilled
the White House counsel regarding the administration’s tolerance of
torture before voting against him.
In recent years, Durbin has become the go-to man for
liberal activists who cannot get a hearing from their own senators. When
Bush nominated Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Diane Sykes, a rigid
conservative with a troubling record on criminal-justice issues, to serve
on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, Wisconsin’s
Democratic senators deferred to home-state pressures and backed away from a
fight. But Durbin took it on, charging that Sykes had engaged in
“major-league evasion” when she was asked by Judiciary
Committee members about abortion-rights issues, and he convinced more than
two dozen Democratic senators to join him in opposing a nominee who many
believe is on the fast track to become the next conservative woman on the
U.S. Supreme Court. “Most senators, particularly senators who are
angling for a place in the leadership, would not take on a fight like
that,” says the Alliance for Justice’s Aron. “But Durbin
recognized that there was a need to challenge her at this point, if only to
establish a record for the future.”
Although Durbin is very
much a member of the inner circle of Senate progressives — after the
2002 elections he formed a loose-knit progressive caucus that included
Massachusetts’s Ted Kennedy, Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, New
Jersey’s Jon Corzine, and several other senators who wanted Democrats
to get more aggressive in battling Bush — he is no fan of lonely
protest votes. He is determined to hold the Democratic caucus together in
order to get the 40 votes necessary to stall Bush nominees and policies.
Even as he moves to leadership, Durbin plans to maintain a high profile on
the Judiciary Committee — and to serve as a bridge between committee
Democrats and the full caucus. “I think the members of our caucus
understand the gravity of this moment,” he says. “The new
Supreme Court justice could tip the scales on many close decisions. I hope
President Bush really does the right thing for America and finds someone
who is more moderate and not extreme. But if he should choose someone who
is extreme in his positions, then I think that the Senate Democratic caucus
will stand together and oppose him.”
Durbin can also be expected to lead on issues related
to the war in Iraq. Both Daschle and Reid voted in favor of authorizing
President Bush to use force against Iraq in the fall of 2002. Durbin, on
the other hand, was one of the Senate’s loudest critics of the
measure. “I felt then as a member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee that the president had not made his case for that war and
certainly had not demonstrated that we were prepared to go in effectively
and win quickly,” he says. “Without a broad coalition, without
the support of other nations, we ran the risk of what we’re currently
facing, which is an intractable conflict with no end in sight.” Does
that mean that Durbin is ready to begin talking about the need for a
timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops? “I don’t know that
we’ve reached that moment, but we may be near,” he says. Then,
showing those political instincts that have served him so well, Durbin
frames his questioning of the war in terms of concern for Army National
Guard and Reserve units that he says have been “pushed to the
breaking point.” He says, “The president is facing a strain on
the military that cannot be sustained.”
Durbin’s vote against the Iraq war came during
his first Senate re-election campaign, and he took hits from his Republican
challenger for casting it, but he was easily re-elected. “Durbin
crossed the Rubicon with that 2002 vote against the war,” says David
Axelrod, the political consultant. “He made it clear that, even as he
was moving up in the Senate, he wasn’t going to start looking over
his shoulder and worrying about what votes were safe.” For his part,
Durbin says, “I think it was the most important vote that I ever cast
in 22 years of service on Capitol Hill, and I think it was one of the best
votes.” Then, sounding like a very different leader than Senate
Democrats have had for a long time, he adds, “I am not going to
shrink away from this at all. In fact, I think the American people are
ready for Democrats to start speaking up.”
Durbin’s determination to speak out, and his
proven ability to do so in ways that work, both on Capitol Hill and beyond,
do not merely mark him as a man to watch in this Congress. They mark him as
one of the best hopes for a party that has struggled for the better part of
a decade to identify itself as something more than just the lite brand of
Republicanism. The man who was on the vice-presidential short lists of Al
Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 dismisses talk of a presidential run;
he jokes that he now leaves such speculation to the junior senator from
Illinois, his friend and ideological ally Barack Obama. What he really
wants, Durbin says, is to stop playing defense and to use what he refers to
as “the most important forum in America” to define the
Democratic Party as a vibrant alternative to the conservative brainlock
that has settled over Washington.
“This is a critical moment for our party, but it
is also a critical moment for our nation. Right now, we have to fight to
prevent bad things from happening, but that’s not enough,” says
Durbin.
“We need to be blunt about what distinguishes
Democrats from Republicans on the issues that matter. You can do that as an
opposition party. And if you do it right, you won’t be the opposition
party for long.”
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2005.
