Dick Durbin

Dick Durbin (born November 21, 1944, East St. Louis, Illinois, U.S.) is an American politician who represented Illinois in the U.S. House of Representatives (1983–97) and in the U.S. Senate (1997– ), where he served as the Democratic majority whip (2005–15) and minority whip (2015– ).

Durbin attended Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., where he earned a B.A. (1966) and a law degree (1969). In 1967 he married Loretta Schaefer, and the couple later had three children. He began his legal career in Springfield, Illinois, where he opened a law practice and also worked as legal counsel to the state’s lieutenant governor, Paul Simon (1969–72), and to the Illinois State Senate Judiciary Committee (1972–82). After unsuccessful runs for a state senate seat in 1976 and for lieutenant governor in 1978, Durbin taught at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (1978–83) while continuing to practice law.

In 1982 Durbin won election to the U.S. House of Representatives. Representing a rural district in central Illinois, he sought to become a friend of farmers. He won a seat on the House Agriculture Committee and later on the Appropriations Committee, where he was a member of the Subcommittee on Agriculture. He was a strong supporter of the use of ethanol, an industrial chemical derived from sugar crops; ethanol manufacturing provided a valuable market for corn farmers in Illinois. He distinguished himself as a critic of big tobacco companies when he sponsored a successful ban (1988) on smoking on commercial airline flights. After Simon, his former employer, announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate in 1996, Durbin ran successfully for his seat.

As a senator, Durbin continued his advocacy for farmers; in 2000 he secured funding for an ethanol research pilot plant to be built near Edwardsville, Illinois. He also sponsored legislation (2001) designed to improve the quality of the country’s food supply by consolidating a dozen federal food-safety agencies into a single agency. Durbin, a Roman Catholic, generally took a liberal stance on social issues, supporting gun control and abortion rights. Beginning in 2001, he positioned himself as an outspoken opponent of Republican Pres. George W. Bush. Durbin, an advocate for global AIDS research and treatment, criticized Bush in 2002 for failing to propose adequate funding for those efforts. Durbin spoke out against the Iraq War (2003) and several domestic initiatives of the Bush administration, including the No Child Left Behind Act (2001). In 2005 Durbin became majority whip, and the following year he pressed the Bush administration to be more forthcoming about the treatment of detainees held by the U.S. military at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, Durbin chaired the human rights subcommittee that he helped establish in 2007.

Durbin was a strong supporter of the successful presidential campaign in 2008 of fellow senator from Illinois Barack Obama. In 2010 Durbin helped secure passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, though the legislation did not include the public option for which he had campaigned. Durbin also successfully argued that financial reforms passed in 2010 include an amendment which regulated the interchange fees assessed to merchants for credit- and debit-card transactions. In the 2014 midterm elections, Durbin won reelection for a third time, but his tenure as majority whip ended after the Republicans gained a majority in the Senate.