Durbin Calls Out Senate Republicans' Hypocrisy on Crime

“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's 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.

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’re not going to take a look at reality. That's what we're faced with.

We have to have a sensible policy when it comes to universal background checks to make sure guns are not ending up in the hands of people that 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. … [But] if you raise that issue on the floor of the United States Senate, you'll have the whole other side of the aisle come here and wave their arms about ‘Second Amendment rights.’

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 United States Attorney, who works as part of the 85 U.S. Attorneys across the United States enforcing the strong federal laws which 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's come to the floor over and over again to stop these appointments from taking place.

So, you can give all the speeches you want on the floor … about how we've got 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.”

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