Crime

Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it is my honor to represent the State of Illinois and the city of Chicago. I cannot tell you how many times Members of the Senate and the House in the other party have gone to the microphones to condemn the city of Chicago and its crime rate.

Let me tell you point-blank, there is too much crime in the city of Chicago, but it is not the only city in America that suffers from that problem. Cities large and small have problems every single day with violent gun crime. My hometown of East St. Louis is a tiny little town of 20,000, 25,000 in comparison to the large metropolis of Chicago. Yet the rate of gun violence there is even higher in East St. Louis than it is in Chicago.

We have to do everything we can to deal with it. Let me tell you what ``everything we can'' means. It means we have to look at the flood of guns coming into these cities from out of State, primarily, without background checks, that are getting into the hands of criminals, who are turning around and killing innocent people. To ignore this flood of guns in the United States of America and condemn crime is to basically take a position that you are not going to look at reality. And that is what we are faced with.

We have to have a sensible policy when it comes to background checks, universal background checks, to make sure guns are not ending up in the hands of people who will misuse them. When they confiscate thousands of guns every year, which they do in Chicago, they find that they come from the surrounding States, which have lax laws, if any, when it comes to checking the background of purchasers. That is a critical element. If you raise that issue on the floor of the U.S. Senate, you will have the whole side of the aisle--the other side--coming here and waving their arms about Second Amendment rights.

I want to tell you, we need common sense when it comes to guns and gun safety. I want that to be part of the conversation on making our cities safer.

The second thing I want to really raise is personal to the Senate. If you want to stop crime in the streets of Chicago or any city--Cleveland or Chicago, for example--one of the first things you need is a competent, aggressive criminal prosecutor, a person known as a U.S. attorney who works as part of the 85 U.S. attorneys across the United States enforcing the strong Federal laws we have enacted.

So why don't we have a U.S. attorney in the city of Chicago? Why don't we have a U.S. attorney in the city of Cleveland? Because of the objections of one Republican Senator who has come to the floor over and over again to stop these appointments from taking place. The nominees have been cleared. They have gone through background checks. Both sides, Democrats and Republicans, have approved them. They are sitting on the calendar, and they cannot move because one Senator from the State of Ohio, a Republican Senator, refuses to lift his hold and give us a chance to vote on them.

So you can give all the speeches you want on the floor of the U.S. Senate from every Member on the other side about how we have to end crime in the city of Chicago, but do me a favor. Speak to this one Senator and convince him that a competent, aggressive criminal prosecutor as U.S. attorney in the city of Chicago is one step toward that goal. To ignore that and to let him hold up this nominee is just unfathomable and inexcusable.

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