Sen. Dick Durbin serves as the Democratic Whip — the second-ranking Democratic member in the U.S. Senate — and is the ranking Democrat on the Senate Defense Appropriations Committee.
Born in Illinois, he graduated from Georgetown School of Foreign Service and Georgetown University Law Center in 1969 and practiced law in Springfield. He ran successfully for the House of Representative in 1982 and was re-elected six times.
He has served in the Senate since his first election in 1996 for the seat of Sen. Paul Simon, for whom he had worked as legal counsel when Simon was Illinois Lieutenant Governor.
In the Senate, he has been a leader on nuclear arms and national security issues. He was one of a minority of Senators to vote against authorizing the 2003 war in Iraq. He was a strong supporter of the Iran nuclear agreement.
In 2018, Durbin was one of 26 senators to sign a letter criticizing the Trump administration’s “now abandoning generations of bipartisan U.S. leadership around the paired goals of reducing the global role and number of nuclear weapons and ensuring strategic stability with America’s nuclear-armed adversaries” and calling on President Trump to continue arms negotiations.
Last year, he a co-sponsored the bill introduced by Sen. Elizabeth Warren to establish a U.S. no-first-use of nuclear weapons policy.
He is a true champion on our issues and we need to keep him in the Senate!
