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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I wanted to join my colleagues from Wyoming. I heard they were paying a tribute to Al Simpson who recently passed away. It was my good fortune 15 years ago to be a member of the Simpson-Bowles Commission where Al Simpson, who had been retired from the Senate, cohosted that with Erskine Bowles in a bipartisan effort to deal with the deficit.

I never had a better time and a more educational experience than to be on that Commission. And, of course, you can't talk about Al Simpson's public service without referring to his sense of humor.

I said to a friend the other day on the floor of the Senate, I miss that part of the Senate. There used to be, you could count on several Senators to always have a joke, and he was one of them.

And good joke-tellers, I have found, have two qualities. First, they tell the same joke many times, but it seems like it is the first time. And, second, they usually start laughing before the punchline because they are enjoying the joke so much themselves.

But in addition to his good humor and nice way about him, he was a wonderful person to work with--really bipartisan. Being a Democrat, I didn't know quite how I would deal with him since we had never served together in the Senate, but he took me under his shoulder like any Member of his own party or family.

I might also mention for the record that Al and his wife were close friends with Paul and Jeanne Simon from Illinois, my predecessor; and Ann Simpson attended the funeral service for Jeanne Simon in Carbondale, IL, and I thought that was a nice tribute family to family.

I am sorry we don't have people like Al Simpson still serving. Maybe it is an incentive for all of us to learn a joke or two.

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