WASHINGTON — With dark-rimmed glasses balanced in the middle of his nose as he looked down on the man President Donald Trump wants to run the FBI, Illinois’ senior senator spoke uninterrupted for 13 minutes late last week as stone-faced nominee Kash Patel shifted in his seat.
“Mr. Patel has neither the experience, the temperament, nor the judgment to lead an agency of 38,000 (agents) and 400 field offices around the globe,” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin said in his opening statement for Patel’s Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Thursday. “During the time I’ve served on this committee, I’ve had the opportunity to consider four FBI director nominations. Each one was a Republican. And I voted for all of them. My concerns about the director of the FBI are not partisan.”
While Durbin argued that he wasn’t picking on Patel because he’s a Republican, his comments blasting Trump’s pick also weren’t a wholly unusual position for the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat.
Indeed, Durbin now finds himself on the front lines of the opposition party’s response to Trump’s ambitious efforts to turn the federal government upside down. That’s especially true when it comes to matters of the judiciary and the rule of law, and it could mean Durbin one day will be the top Democrat questioning — and probably opposing — any Trump picks for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Durbin was always likely to be a frequent Trump critic on the Judiciary Committee. But with Republicans taking control of the Senate this past election, his job will be even more focused on rallying opposition as the panel’s top Democrat.
The Republican president, who faced federal criminal investigations for interfering with elections and stealing classified documents, has begun to install people personally loyal to him to lead the Justice Department and the FBI. Trump also fired career DOJ lawyers who worked with a special prosecutor on Trump-related investigations.
Since Trump won the 2024 election, Durbin hammered Patel for repeatedly touting conspiracy theories and threatening to go after Trump’s enemies and questioned whether Pam Bondi, the former Florida attorney general who represented Trump during his first impeachment trial, would act independently of the president as the nation’s attorney general. She nevertheless was confirmed by the committee in a party-line vote.
In cable news interviews, Durbin has railed against Trump’s pardon of violent Jan. 6 protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol and attacked police officers. And on Friday, Durbin criticized a Justice Department official’s order to terminate at least eight high-ranking FBI officers involved in investigating the Jan. 6 attacks and review of the work of thousands of other FBI agents. While acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove wrote that he did “not believe the current leadership of the Justice Department can trust these FBI employees to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully,” Durbin said the move was “a brazen assault on the rule of law that also severely undermines our national security and public safety.”
“Unelected Trump lackeys are carrying out widespread political retribution against our nation’s career law enforcement officials,” he said in a statement. “President Trump would rather have the FBI and DOJ full of blind admirers and loyalists than experienced law enforcement officers.”
The combative approach comes as Durbin’s every move is being closely watched.
The 80-year-old senator has not yet announced whether he will seek election to a sixth term in 2026, a decision that could have far-reaching implications in Illinois political circles.
In the meantime, there is consternation among some about his ability to forcefully lead the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.
Laurence Tribe, a prominent liberal Harvard law professor, told The Washington Post recently that Durbin was a “disappointment” and that he worried that the senator would be a “lackluster leader of the opposition.”
‘Take a look at the record’
The questions come as memories are still fresh of how Durbin’s predecessor in the role, the late U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, hugged her Republican counterpart after the committee in 2020 approved Trump-nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court.
Durbin, though, doesn’t seem fazed by the scrutiny. He said in an interview with the Tribune that his success as chair of the Judiciary Committee during the Biden administration shows he can also be an effective opposition leader.
“Occasionally, a reporter will bring that up or an interest group might bring it up, and all I ask them to do is take a look at the record,” Durbin said in December. “You can’t achieve 235 new judges — a record in modern history of this process — without being willing to take a few arrows. I’ve done that, and I will continue to do so if necessary. But I’ll be honest with you, I’m looking for bipartisanship every chance I get.”
Since giving up the Judiciary Committee gavel in January when the GOP took the Senate, Durbin’s official role is now “ranking member.” It’s a position that by its nature is less about bipartisanship and more about rallying public opinion against presidential nominees, especially in the Trump era.
“The ranking member used to matter a lot, and now it matters less,” said Joshua Huder, a congressional expert and a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. When senators could still filibuster judicial and executive branch nominees, the ranking member worked with the majority party to find palatable candidates who could get a 60-vote supermajority to be confirmed by the Senate. But that began to change in 2013 when Democrats invoked the “nuclear option” to let most nominees pass instead with a simple majority.
“Right now, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee is essentially just an opposition person,” Huder said. “They’re there to seriously vet candidates, but they’re no longer there to say whether someone is at least quasi-acceptable to the minority because it doesn’t matter anymore. The majority can just steamroll them. And we’ve seen this happen again and again.”
The difference has been especially notable in the nomination hearings for Supreme Court Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Barrett, he said, after Republicans removed the supermajority thresholds for high court nominees in 2017.
Kavanaugh memorably attacked senators during his 2018 confirmation hearing, where he faced accusations that he sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford when they were both teenagers. “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record,” Kavanaugh said.
That wouldn’t have happened when nominees needed some members of the opposition party to clear the Senate, Huber said, but it happens regularly now.
“These partisan dynamics did not exist prior to the nuclear option, because the last thing you wanted was to go into a confirmation hearing and yell at the people whose votes you needed to win in order to get confirmed,” he said.
No more hugs
On the other hand, the 2020 confirmation hearing for Barrett showed Democrats the dangers of not having a vigorous spokesperson to lead the charge.
Trump nominated Barrett less than two months before the 2020 election, and Republicans pushed it through. The move angered Democrats because Republicans in 2016 blocked President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nomination seven months before the general election on the grounds that whoever succeeded Obama should fill the vacancy.
But rather than fight Republicans over the hypocrisy, Feinstein declared the Barrett confirmation “one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in” before walking over to hug Republican U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who chaired the committee. Soon after the hearings, reports started circulating that Feinstein, then 87, had been suffering from memory lapses, and liberal activist groups began demanding she resign from her leadership position on the committee.
Durbin saw the episode up close. He briefed reporters regularly on the progress of the hearings, and his Democratic colleagues chose Durbin — a former parliamentarian in the Illinois Senate — to stay in the hearing room to object to any rule changes or procedural maneuvers Graham made.
When Feinstein stepped down, Durbin took over. But not without an internal Democratic fight.
U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island ran against Durbin, arguing that the Illinoisan already had enough power. Durbin was the party whip, which meant he became the second-most powerful Democrat in the Senate when his party took control in 2021. But Durbin prevailed, in part, by noting that he had never chaired a committee or even the Democratic faction on one, despite his more than two decades in the Senate.
Seniority and age
Durbin’s seniority helped him get the post, as longevity often does in the power dynamics on Capitol Hill. But the seniority system has lost some of its importance, Huder said, as Democratic and Republican activists push for younger representatives and senators to have more leadership roles and force some of the old bulls to be more responsive to their concerns.
Whatever the reason, Huder said Durbin has become more partisan in recent years.
“There’s been an evolution,” he said. “He’s transitioned from more of an agreeable dealmaker to somebody who’s more partisan-edged and less likely to take whatever’s handed to him.”
While his experience is still considered an asset in Washington, the same can’t exactly be said of his age.
Durbin is only two years younger than former President Joe Biden — who opted not to run for re-election amid concerns that his advanced age had diminished his ability to lead the country — and the senator is nearly two years older than Trump.
Shortly after the 2024 election, Axios reported that unnamed Democrats “were nervous” about whether Durbin “has the fire to fight Trump nominees,” citing his age, although the story quoted no Senate colleagues opposing Durbin.
When asked, none of the press officers for Democrats on the Judiciary Committee provided comments on Durbin’s effectiveness.
Demand Justice, a liberal group that had called for Feinstein’s resignation and that backed Whitehouse’s candidacy to lead the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, declined to comment specifically about Durbin’s performance as chairman and now as ranking member.
“Democrats must stand firm against Trump’s judicial picks,” the group’s managing director, Maggie Jo Buchanan, said in a statement. “By the end of his second term, (Trump) could have the chance to appoint half of all active federal judges — and make no mistake, this would be a disastrous outcome for people across the country. Senate Democrats must do all in their power to oppose extremist nominees and protect our courts from a MAGA takeover.”
Durbin spokesperson Emily Hampsten rejected any doubts about Durbin’s effectiveness.
“Watch Sen. Durbin at work and tell me he isn’t the right person for this job at this historic moment,” she said in an email. “The volume of work as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in the last three short weeks alone shows that Sen. Durbin is not only fit to lead but the right person to lead the committee.”
Hampsten said Durbin also showed his effectiveness during Trump’s first term when he “served as a crucial voice pushing back against the unqualified Trump judicial nominees, and played a lead role against the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Amy Coney Barrett.”
Durbin, though, is also quick to point out how well he can work with Republicans, noting that the vast majority of Biden-nominated judges approved under his watch had bipartisan support.
Two Midwest senators
The new chair of the committee is U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a 91-year-old Republican who often touts his own bipartisan bona fides.
“I don’t know what to expect, other than to tell you the starting point is a good one,” Durbin said in December, noting that he and Grassley worked together on criminal justice reforms that Trump signed in his first term.
“I have a friendship with Chuck Grassley over many years,” Durbin said. “We worked together successfully, and we are truly personal friends. I’m not saying that he won’t have a political bent on some of these decisions — I’ve been accused of the same — but we start at a good personal level.”
Grassley has echoed those sentiments.
“Durbin is pretty easy to work with,” Grassley said in January. “We trust each other. We don’t stab each other in the back.”
While the two Midwest senators have been at odds over Trump’s nominees, they have found some common ground. They sent a letter to Trump asking the president to provide a “substantive rationale” for Trump firing the inspectors general of 18 federal agencies. They noted that Congress passed a law in 2022 requiring the president to give lawmakers a 30-day notice before dismissing the watchdogs.
Huder, the Georgetown expert, said ranking members of committees had to make tactical decisions on when to cooperate with the majority party and when to put up a fight.
“If you are just 100% opposing everything, burning down the walls, you’re going to find yourself with a lot less negotiating room when it is time for the majority to be bipartisan,” he said, noting that Republicans might need Democrats to pass budget bills or approve efforts to raise the debt ceiling. “Burn-it-to-the-ground partisanship is not necessarily in their interest as they negotiate all of these kinds of maneuvers.”
