At today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, a moment of levity was enjoyed as Republican Senators paid their respects to Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), who is retiring at the end of his term.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Be reported to the floor, Senator Kennedy.
00:05Senator Kennedy.
00:07Mr. Chairman, I think this is the first time we have met as a committee
00:14since Senator Durbin announced that he wasn't going to run for re-election.
00:20And I wanted to acknowledge that and thank him for his years of service.
00:26I know it was a difficult decision.
00:28Thanks, Senator.
00:30I haven't said anything about it, but I did tweet on the subjects.
00:34I refer you to that.
00:36Well, tweeting is better.
00:38He's so with it.
00:40He is.
00:41He's what cool looks like.
00:43Senator Lee.
00:45I also just wanted to chime in.
00:47I really enjoyed working with Senator Durbin, and we'll miss him.
00:51He was one of the first people who had befriended me when I joined the committee 14 years ago.
00:56We've worked on a lot of legislation together and passed some good things.
00:59And I appreciate your service.
01:03Senator Cruz.
01:04Well, Mr. Chairman, to join this parade, while Senator Kennedy chose to speak about Senator Durbin
01:10and Chairman Grassley chose to tweet about Senator Durbin, I did a podcast about Senator Durbin.
01:16And I apologized to him yesterday on the floor because I actually sang his praises in the podcast,
01:23which I'm sure will be used as ammunition for political attacks for his remaining tenure in the Senate.
01:29But he is a remarkably talented lawyer, and he and I have disagreed on many issues, but he is a formidable adversary.
01:43And as I said on the podcast, he sounds quite reasonable at times, even when he is not.
01:47And so that's a compliment of sorts.
01:51And, Dick, we will miss you.
01:54Senator Cruz, you're never in danger of that happening to you.
01:59Are you going to say something about the market?
02:03Well, I said it all on Twitter.
02:05No, no, no.
02:06We're talking about the market.
02:08What?
02:08You could read us your tweet.
02:12Oh, yeah.
02:13Well, I guess this is something I neglected to say after.
02:19This isn't about his retirement.
02:21This is about a subject he brought up when he opened his comments.
02:25I'm going to wait until we get the D.C. U.S. attorney put on the agenda.
02:32In the meantime, we've had people on our staff that had more questions than I think wanted to meet personally.
02:42And then also, I see from your statement, you've gone through all 500 questions that you've read through.
02:50I haven't done that yet, so we'll wait until we put it on the agenda.
02:54And another reason I didn't say anything is I thought our staff said work this out ahead of time.
03:01But I'm willing to state publicly what I think was worked out at that particular time.
03:06And I thank you for not bringing up the vote for the hearing yet.
03:10Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
03:11Yeah.
03:12Okay.
03:12Meeting adjourned.