U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin said Monday that last week’s election giving Republicans control of the chamber and leaving Democrats in the minority is now part of the calculus as he evaluates his political future.
Durbin, the Senate’s No. 2 ranking Democrat, turns 80 on Nov. 21 and has yet to say if he’ll run for reelection in 2026. He has been in the Senate since 1997 after serving 14 years in the House.
After the Nov. 5 election, Republicans will hold at least 53 Senate seats with one race, in Arizona, yet to be decided, though Democrat Ruben Gallego was leading Republican Kari Lake by nearly 70,000 votes with 92% of the expected ballots counted.
The GOP victories undid a 50-50 tie in the Senate that gave Democrats control of the chamber because Vice President Kamala Harris was a tiebreaker as Senate president.
“I’m going to watch and see what this means,” Durbin said in an interview after the city’s Veterans Day remembrance ceremony at Soldier Field. “I enjoy serving in the Senate. I’m a realist about the future. But I want to see how the relationship works.”
Durbin noted that he was able to engineer what he called “the most significant sentencing reform bill in modern history” during Donald Trump’s first administration, working with Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. The First Step Act reduced mandatory minimum federal prison sentences for some nonviolent drug offenses and created programs to reduce recidivism “so things can be done if you’re doing it the right way,” he said.
Durbin is expected to announce his future intentions in the new year. Should he decide not to seek reelection, a host of Democrats would be expected to seek the seat and it also could open the door for several Republican contenders, though Illinois has not elected a GOP senator since Mark Kirk won his single term in 2010.
The Democrats loss of power in the chamber will strip Durbin of his chairmanship of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, a position from which he led nomination hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
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Asked if he would serve as the ranking minority member on the judiciary panel, Durbin said “it remains to be seen” who will take over as chair. “I hope it’s Lindsey Graham,” he said of the South Carolina senator who currently leads the minority on the panel, “but I can live with Chuck Grassley if he’s chosen.”
“What I tried to do when I was chairman for four years at judiciary was to establish some bipartisan standards,” Durbin said, such as retaining the “blue slip” process that allows the home state senator of a judicial candidate to block a nomination.
“It was being challenged by my own party. I can go chapter and verse and tell you people who are madder than hell at me because I said I’m going to respect the blue slip because Lindsey Graham told me he’ll respect it if he’s chairman,” Durbin said. “So it remains to be seen how that works.”
Durbin said the process enabled him to fill every vacancy on the federal bench in Illinois during Trump’s first term.
“During the Trump administration, we filled every vacancy in Illinois, every judgeship I had to sit down and bargain with the chief counsel for President Trump, which wasn’t always easy,” he said.
“He got some people I didn’t like. I got some people he didn’t like,” Durbin said. In the latter group was Mary Rowland, who in 2019 became the first openly lesbian judge to serve in the Chicago area’s Northern District.
So, as far as staying on the Judiciary Committee, Durbin said, “the short answer is, it depends on what the Trump administration is going to do when it comes to judges, and it depends on who will chair the Senate Judiciary Committee.”
Durbin lamented that passing major legislation like the prison sentencing reform measure is now increasingly rare in the Senate amid a pattern of more limited action.
“That’s the nature of the Senate now. I mean, it used to be we had a handful of big bills moving every year. Not so anymore. Not so on a regular schedule,” he said, also noting changes that limit floor amendments to legislation. “It just isn’t the Senate anymore. It isn’t the way it works.”
Durbin also said he and his staff are researching major transportation funding-related items for Illinois to make sure the money will flow despite a Trump presidency.
“We’ve got to make sure we’ve nailed down the projects,” he said.
