Coffee with the senator

     Sen. Dick Durbin announced Wednesday that he won't run for re-election. Of course he did. In an era when politicians leap to look out for themselves, first, last and always, clinging to power until it's pried away, Durbin is a man out-of-time, cleaving to the old standards of service to country before service to self. Who knows where we'd be today if Joe Biden had done the same in a timely fashion, although Durbin had the benefit of learning from Biden's bad example. I'll miss Sen. Durbin, for the good he did for our country, our state, and for how accessible he was — the kind of guy you could sit down with and share a cup of coffee.

OPENING SHOT

      Had a cup of java with my old pal Dick Durbin at a Madison Street coffee shop Thursday morning.
     "So you don't think Alito is so bad?" said Illinois' senior senator, alluding to a column I wrote suggesting that President Bush's current nominee to the Supreme Court wasn't the kind of towel-gnawing conservative crazy who would justify the Democrats kicking out the stops to block him. I assumed a filibuster was a flat-out political impossibility but Durbin — who is on the Judiciary Committee, and thus should know — disagrees.
     "I would have told you that last week," he said. "But after meeting with my colleagues, I'm not sure. We can't rule it out. I was surprised at the intensity of feeling."
     They are convinced that Alito will not only pitch Roe vs. Wade, but lead us into a world of excessive governmental power and reduced individual rights — a dark new Alito's America.
     Not that they got that across. A murderer's row of Democratic senatorial powerhouses, led by Ted Kennedy, had hours of choice TV time to tar Alito, and came off looking verbose and ineffective.
     "It wasn't an easy week, I'll tell you," Durbin said, with a laugh.
     To be fair, the Dems were in a bind -—anything resembling tough questioning would be seen as bullying a respected jurist, which doesn't poll well. So they were left speechifying and focusing on minutia.
     None of it added up to the impression that Alito was too conservative to serve.
     "We look back and say, 'What went wrong?' " said Durbin, who insists that the American people feel Bush won the election and therefore gets to pick his court nominee, but they didn't realize they would also be getting Alito's America.
     "Did he win the election saying he would appoint a justice to the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade?" said Durbin. "This isn't what we bargained for."
     Durbin said Democratic senators will decide over the next several days whether they want to take the dramatic step of filibustering the nomination. It's still a long shot but, I'll tell you this: It would make great theater.

     — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 20, 2006

     Had breakfast the other morning with Sen. Dick Durbin and Dan Seals, the young Democrat who just might unseat Mark Kirk in the 10th Congressional District next week. We were discussing that age-old question of whether the current election really is the most mean-spirited in history or only feels that way. Conversation naturally moved to George Allen, the Virginia senator who, having pretty much dug his own political grave with his mouth, is desperately lashing out at his opponent, Jim Webb, by pointing shrilly to salty lines culled from Webb's war novels as if they were evidence of perversion. Durbin used a phrase I hadn't heard before.
     "George Allen is a spit tobacco senator," he said. "One of four in the Senate." Meaning that he dips and chews tobacco, a vile habit better left in the barn. But Allen doesn't leave it in the barn. Durbin entertainingly described a flight down to Guantanamo he and Allen shared on a military airplane, and the cringing revulsion the clean-cut, dignified and ramrod straight military hosts extended toward Allen, a drooling nicotine addict dribbling brown saliva into a plastic cup. That's a grosser image than anything in Webb's novels.

      — Originally published in the Sun-Times, Nov. 1, 2006

     For many years, my column took up a page and ended with a joke, often sent in by readers. Sen. Durbin shared what had to be a real occurrence

TODAY'S CHUCKLE ...

     Normally, you couldn't pry me off the couch on a Sunday afternoon. But this Sunday, Jan. 20, the first-ever 10th District Democratic Convention ... The public is invited, and the keynote address is by my old pal and regular reader, Sen. Dick Durbin who — completely unrelated to Sunday's convention — sent in this joke:
     The senior senator from Illinois was visiting an elementary school in Caseyville. Always eager to impart the importance of understanding our democratic system, the senator asked the children in a third-grade class whether anyone could name the vice president of the United States.
     There was a silence. Finally, a small voice from the back of the room ventured: "Judge Judy?"

     —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Jan. 18, 2008