WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) paid tribute today to his friend and former colleague, President Barack Obama on the United States Senate Floor:
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“A memorable moment in my life, which most people wouldn’t have remembered but I’ll never forget. It was July 27, 2004, the place was Boston, Massachusetts. At the last minute I was called on to introduce a friend of mine, a skinny lawyer and state senator from Illinois was about to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. His name was Barack Obama,” said Durbin. “President Obama is a profoundly good and decent man who has served America with dignity and integrity. He has been thoughtful, calm and resolute – never rash or impulsive. He is a disciplined leader who has grappled honestly with complex challenges facing America and the world and has delivered solutions that improved lives. He’s tried his level best to heal and unite our divided nation. His accomplishments are significant and history will record many of them as profound.”
Audio of Durbin’s remarks is available here.
Video of Durbin’s remarks is available here.
Durbin’s remarks as prepared for delivery are available below:
Remarks of U.S. Senator Dick Durbin
Tribune to President Barack Obama
January 17, 2017
Mr. President, one of the most memorable moments in my life is likely to go down in history books as just a footnote, but for me it is – all these years later – still astonishing.
It was one of the moments that divides history into two halves: Before and after. It was July 27, 2004. Boston, Massachusetts.
I had the great honor to introduce to America a friend of mine -- a skinny lawyer and state Senator from Illinois who was about to deliver the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
His name was Barack Obama. I had known him for several years. I knew he was an extraordinarily good and gifted politician – an extraordinarily good and gifted man.
I had seen him inspire many audiences – including some in what seemed like the unlikeliest of places.
I once saw him hold spellbound a group of blue-collar workers and farmers in a small town in southern Illinois that was once a hotbed for the KKK.
But even I was not prepared for the powerfully moving speech that Barack Obama would deliver that night in Boston – or for the way Americans would respond to it.
He told us: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there's the United States of America.
“The pundits,” he said: “like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too: We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don't like federal agents poking around in our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States, and, yes, we've got some gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq.”
He spoke for 17 minutes. In those 17 minutes, he gave voice to what another tall, lanky lawyer from Illinois once called “the better angels of our nature.”
And he touched a longing deep within millions of Americans who wanted desperately to believe in those better angels, who wanted to believe in what Barack Obama called “the audacity of hope.” The audacity to believe that America -- which had achieved so many miracles – was capable of even greater goodness.
People inside the convention hall and millions outside who heard that speech all had the same reaction: “I have seen America’s future.”
President Obama’s grandmother, who had helped raise him, was a little more reserved.
She called her grandson after the speech and told him: “You did well. … I just kind of worry about you. I hope you keep your head on straight.”
A little over four years later, my friend – then United States Senator Barack Obama – was elected the 44th President of the United States of America.
On Inauguration Day 2009, 2 million Americans stood shoulder-to shoulder in the shadow of the Capitol dome in Washington and cheered as this son of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas placed his hand on the Lincoln family Bible and Kenyan father and swore to uphold the Constitution of the United States.
For the last eight years, President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, their daughters Malia and Sasha, and First Grandmother Marian Robinson have made their home in the White House – a house built by slaves.
The audacity of hope. The awe-inspiring strength of America to continually seek and stretch to be that “more perfect union.”
Part of the miracle of America is also the peaceful transition of power, from one President to the next.
As we prepare for the transition to a new President, we would do well to look back on the historic presidency of Barack Obama and the good America achieved under his leadership.
He was elected and re-elected President – both times convincingly.
His grandmother would be proud that this President has not only “kept [his] head on straight, he has held his head high and kept his priorities straight -- even amidst often unprecedented, unyielding opposition and searingly personal attacks.
As First Lady Michelle Obama told us, the motto for the entire Obama family has been: “When they go low, we go high.”
We have seen that grace in them all time and time again.
President Obama is a profoundly good and decent man who has served America with dignity and integrity.
He has been thoughtful, calm and resolute – never rash or impulsive.
He is a disciplined leader who has grappled honestly with complex challenges facing America and the world and delivered solutions that has improved the lives of millions.
In his farewell speech in Chicago, President Obama quoted the beloved fictional hero, Atticus Finch, reminding us: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view … until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
Putting himself in the other person’s shoes … seeing life through another person’s eyes and finding shared hopes is a lifelong habit, and a special gift, of this President.
He has tried his level best to heal and unite our divided nation.
President Obama’s accomplishments are significant; history is likely to record many of them as historic and profound.
He was first elected at a time when America badly needed hope.
President Obama inherited – inherited -- the greatest financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression.
The country had lost more than 2 million jobs in just the previous four months alone.
By Inauguration Day 2009, the country’s top-four banks had lost half their value in less than a year.
There was a real and urgent danger that the America economy could collapse, and pull down the global economy with it.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – what we call the “stimulus bill” – saved the U.S. and global economy from a major crash and helped create conditions for a sustained economic recovery.
Unemployment is now 4.9 percent and America has just seen the longest streak of private-job creation in our history.
To borrow a phrase: Thanks, Obama.
Our friends across the aisle said: Let America’s auto industry die. The Obama Administration decided to place its bets on American manufacturing and American workers instead.
The Center for Automotive Research estimates the special bankruptcy process for General Motors and Chrysler saved at least 1.5 million American jobs. Detroit has posted record profits for seven years in a row.
Predatory lending and other systemic abuses were the cancer at the heart of the Great Financial Meltdown of 2008 and 2009.
Under this President, Congress passed the most comprehensive overhaul of financial regulation since the Great Depression, to protect Americans consumers and taxpayers and make another financial crisis less likely.
President Obama inherited a federal budget that was hemorrhaging red ink.
Under his watch, the budget deficit has fallen $1 trillion -- despite record investments in education … green energy … broadband … high-speed rail … medical research … and other high-return priorities.
The Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act that our colleagues across the aisle are now rushing headlong to repeal – without anything to replace it -- represents the greatest advance in economic fairness and security for most Americans since at least the creation of Medicare 50 years ago.
Obamacare has made the health coverage of all insured Americans more secure and more valuable by: Outlawing discrimination based on pre-existing conditions; Eliminating costs for checkups, mammograms and many other preventive measures; and allowing young people to stay on their parent’s policies until age 26 – among other new protections.
It has reduced the ranks of uninsured Americans by 20 million. And it has saved money. That’s not a matter of opinion, it’s a fact.
According to an analysis by the respected, nonpartisan Brookings Institution, health insurance exchange premiums are 44 percent lower today than they would have been without Obamacare.
Health insurance costs are going down at the fastest rate in 50 years.
Numerous Republican governors – including President-elect Mike Pence – have used the Medicaid expansion in Obamacare to reduce the uninsured in their states. That’s a good thing.
But now President-elect Trump and our Republican colleagues tell us that they want to repeal Obamacare … cancel those patient protections … go back to the days when insurance companies write all the rules … and leave 20 million Americans without insurance.
They say they will come up “fairly easily” with something better than Obamacare.
I say to my friends: If it were easy, it would have happened already. Work with us to fix the things that can be improved, not kill it. Lives are at stake.
President Obama understands that climate change is not an unproven theory or a Chinese-authored hoax, it is a fact. It is a threat to the very existence of humanity and we are running out of time to prevent a climate catastrophe.
Under Barack Obama, America went from being the chronic spoiler to being a world leader in global climate change negotiations
We reached a sweeping bilateral climate pact with China to cut greenhouse gas emissions – something critics said could never happen.
American built on that historic breakthrough at the 2015 UN summit on climate change in Paris. When the summit ended, 195 countries had agreed to lower greenhouse-gas emissions.
The President once told a group of young people: “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.”
He has done his part to keep that commitment. We should build on his progress, not reverse it.
The cornerstone of President Obama’s foreign policy is a recognition that America remains the world’s one indispensable nation and that we, and the world, are safer when America chooses engagement over either isolation or unilateralism.
He also understands that America cannot fix all of the world’s problems. We have to choose wisely, based on our ideals, our priorities and our limits.
He banned the use of torture. He has seen the withdrawal of the majority of US troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has been decimated; ISIS is on the run. And Osama Bin Laden is dead.
Under President Obama, America led the successful global effort to contain and conquer an Ebola epidemic in West Africa. And we helped preserve a democratic Ukraine against Russian aggression.
President Obama announced plans to restore normal relations with Cuba – reversing 50 years of a failed policy that done at least as much harm to America’s relations with our neighbors in this hemisphere as it had done to depose the Castro regime.
The President and Secretary of State John Kerry made a momentous diplomatic success in negotiating an agreement to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons.
The Iran nuclear deal holds the promise of defusing a ticking time bomb. If Iran fails to live up to that promise, we will know quickly and we will take the steps to stop them.
I want to touch briefly on two other issues that I have worked on very closely and to which I am deeply committed.
The first is the growing, bipartisan movement to end America’s era of over-incarceration.
America has 5 percent of the world’s population – and nearly 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. That ignominious fact is largely the result of inflexible anti-drug laws that disproportionately punish people of color, especially poor people of color.
In 2010, President Obama signed a law that I introduced with Senator Sessions called the Fair Sentencing Act. It replaced a federal law that demanded dramatically harsher sentences for convictions involving crack cocaine than powder cocaine.
I have worked with Democrats and some brave Republican colleagues for a few years to further reform federal sentencing – to allow federal judges some discretion in non-violent drug cases … and eliminate “three strikes and you’re out law” and other overly harsh and inflexible laws that are overly harsh and hugely expensive to enforce.
In the absence of action from us, President Obama has used his powers to commute the sentences of more than 1,000 people — more than 50 times the number of people whose sentences were commuted by President George W. Bush and more than the past 11 presidents combined.
We can’t have it both ways. If we don’t want President’s to use their lawful executive authority to correct injustices, we need to correct those injustices ourselves. I hope we will do so in this new Congress.
Finally, we must – we must – fix America’s broken immigration system.
And let’s start by assuring Dreamers – those young people who were brought to this country as children and who are undocumented through no fault of their own – that we will not deport them from the only nation they have ever called home.
I have come to this floor dozens of times to tell you their stories. They are scholars … American soldiers … researchers … doctors … engineers … lawyers … clergy members.
DACA -- the President’s executive order --- allows them to stay in this country temporarily while Congress works to pass a comprehensive immigration reform plan that meets the needs of our economy, and honors our values and our unique and powerful heritage as a nation of immigrants.
More than 750,000 Dreamers put their trust in our government and came forward to register under DACA.
What will happen to them if -- as many fear – if DACA is not extended?
Immigrants are not a threat to America. Immigrants are America. The sooner we acknowledge that fact and align our laws with it, the better we will be.
Mr. President, I could go on for quite some time about what President Obama, Vice President Biden and their Administration have meant for America, but time precludes that so I will close with this these last thoughts:
In that historic speech he delivered in Boston 12 years ago, President Obama told us that, in his father’s native tongue, the name “Barack” means “blessing.”
President Obama leaves office now as the most popular politician in America, and assured of his place in history. I believe that America has been fortunate – even blessed – by his service and sacrifice as our President.
President Obama has also warned us that “History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.” I hope that we can all pledge, regardless of party, to keep history moving forward.