Richard (Dick) Durbin
BS in foreign services and economics from Georgetown University in 1966 and a JD from Georgetown Law School in 1969, Durbin served as legal counsel for the Illinois Lieutenant Governor (1969-73) and the Illinois Senate Judiciary Committee (1972-82), and as an associate professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (1978-83). He then held a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1983-97, and has been a Democratic U.S. Senator representing Illinois since January 1997. His 1996 Senate campaign was supported by the longtime Chicago socialist Timuel Black and the Chicago chapter of Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
As a freshman member of the Senate Government Reform Committee in 1997, Durbin helped deflect the well-substantiated allegations that the Bill Clinton White House and the Democratic National Committee had received campaign contributions from Communist China to influence the ’96 elections. In 1998-99, Durbin was one of Mr. Clinton’s most ardent and effective defenders during the president’s impeachment proceedings.
Durbin also called for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention center, where Islamic terrorists and enemy combatants were being held. In a June 14, 2005 speech on the Senate floor, Durbin read from an FBI report which claimed that detainees were sometimes held in rooms where the temperatures were either too cold or too hot, and where loud rap music was being played. “If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.” Read here: http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/06/22/durbin-apologizes-for-nazi-gulag-pol-pot-remarks.html
On September 18, 2008, Durbin participated in a closed-door meeting with then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who briefed Durbin and other congressional leaders on the gravity of the financial crisis that was beginning to hit the American economy. The next day, Durbin sold off $42,696 in mutual-fund shares; before the end of the month, he had sold off another $73,000 in shares. Then the stock market collapsed. By October 17, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had plunged by 22%. Critics characterized Durbin’s sell-off as an act of hypocrisy, since he had previously complained that people who engaged in insider trading generally did not face sufficiently severe criminal penalties. http://economicpolicyjournal.com/labels/InsiderTrading.html
In 2013 Durbin was a key member of the so-called “Gang of Eight”—four Democrat and four Republican U.S. senators—who tried to pass a sweeping, 844-page immigration-reform bill aimed at giving provisional legal status to at least 11 million illegal immigrants and placing them on a path-to-citizenship. The other Democrats on the panel were Charles Schumer, Robert Menendez, and Michael Bennet. A Politico.com analysis noted that their proposal, if passed, “would transform the nation’s political landscape” by “pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that … would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.” https://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/immigration-reform-could-upend-electoral-college-090478#ixzz2RJTQznyW
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