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Floor Speech

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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, one of the most important votes that I ever cast in the House or the Senate was the result of a challenge from a complete stranger. The year was 1986. I was running late to the airport, heading back to Chicago from Phoenix, AZ.

Now, those were the days when you could get a ticket at the airline counter at the last minute, but if you were too late, the good seats on the plane would all be gone. When I was handed my boarding pass in Phoenix, I saw that I was put in a middle seat in the smoking section at the back of the plane.

I asked the United Airlines attendant: Isn't there something you can do about this?

She looked down at my ticket and my title and said: No, but, Congressman, there is something you can do about it.

I thanked her and made the flight. As I squirmed in my seat to try to avoid the smoke clouds, I began to look around the plane. In front of me, only a few rows away, was an older person. Near him was a new mom with a baby. I thought to myself: This makes no sense at all. These people are supposed to be sitting in the nonsmoking section. I am in the smoking section, yet they are just a few rows ahead, breathing the same secondhand smoke that I am breathing.

When I got back to DC, I called my House staff together and told them I had an idea: I wanted to ban smoking on airplanes. My staff told me I was crazy. The tobacco industry was the most powerful lobby force in Washington, with support from the top leadership of both political parties.

I can remember going through orientation in the House when a leader who will go unnamed on the Democratic side in the House closed the door to the room for all 50 new Members of the House--Democrats--and said: Let me explain to you about tobacco and politics. Keep your hands off of it.

That was the advice.

Here I was, a relatively new Member of Congress who wanted to take on the tobacco lobby. Everyone said I didn't have a shot. With the leadership on both sides against me, I didn't have a prayer. But this was personal to me and to a lot of people who served in Congress. My father died of lung cancer when I was 14 years old. He was 53 years old. He smoked two packs of Camels a day. I thought of him when I was sitting on that flight from Phoenix, and I remembered him as I began to pursue this cause.

One thing I did have going for me was that the U.S. House of Representatives was, I thought, the largest frequent flyer club in the world. Many other Members told me privately they hated breathing in cigarette smoke on airplanes just as much as I did. But to pass the bill, we would need to overcome opposition from many of our colleagues who were avid smokers, including the then-chairman of the House Public Works Committee.

One of those colleagues was on the Appropriations Committee, where I served, the late Congressman Marty Sabo of Minnesota. He had the power to make or break our bill, and he was a chain-smoker. I went up to him, and I said: Marty, what is the longest you can go without a cigarette?

He told me: Two hours.

So I said 2 hours it will be. We introduced a bill that would ban smoking on all domestic flights that were 2 hours or less so I could clear the hurdle of Marty Sabo. We passed the bill in the House by some miraculous chain of events after the Rules Committee literally defied the Speaker and let me offer an amendment.

The chairman of the Rules Committee was a man named Claude Pepper. Claude Pepper was a legendary Congressman from Florida and a spokesman for senior citizens across the Nation. He had a unique way of speaking, and I won't try to imitate it. But when he voted for me over the Speaker and gave me a chance to bring my amendment to the floor, I went to meet with him personally afterwards and thank him. He said to me: You know I was a Member of the Senate at one time.

I said: Yes, I do. And you came back after you lost running for the Senate to serve in the House for many years.

He said: When I was in the Senate, I created the National Cancer Institute, so I wanted to give you a vote.

Thanks to his help and the help of the late Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, the bill cleared the Senate shortly thereafter.

It seems strange that major legislation can be determined by such minor personal details like how long a Congressman can go without a smoke, but the personal issue is everything in Congress. Pick any cause championed by myself or one of my colleagues, and there is a good chance there is a story behind it and a personal story it is. When we take the time to sit down with our fellow Members and hear their stories, their interests, their worries, we often can find a compromise that makes a difference. That is how we got the support we needed to ban smoking on airplanes.

The 2-hour ban became law in 1988. Two years later, it was expanded to all domestic flights. People had experienced smoke-free skies, and they were not going back.

Today is the 36th anniversary of that law prohibiting smoking on all domestic flights. It is also the anniversary of one of the biggest tipping points in the fight against smoking and Big Tobacco. After my ban passed, Americans started asking obvious questions: So if secondhand smoke is dangerous on an airplane, why isn't it dangerous in a bus or a train or an office building or a restaurant or a hospital? And as more Americans asked these questions, smoking disappeared gradually from public life.

I used to joke that when Members of Congress were elected back in the 1980s, one of their first stops was at the stationery store to buy a big, honking ashtray that they stuck on their coffee table in their office for all the visitors all during the day who came in with either a ``yes,'' a ``no,'' or a ``maybe'' and smoked their cigarettes. You can't even find those ashtrays anymore, thank goodness.

In the year 2000--listen to this--almost 30 percent of high school students smoked cigarettes--30 percent; today, 2 percent. And thousands of lives have been saved from deadly disease along the way.

This accomplishment is more than my own, and I am not taking personal credit for it. It is a culmination of work over decades from activists, lawyers, doctors, and so many other people who decided to fight Big Tobacco, against the odds. Their bravery and efforts deserve recognition. Their contributions are felt every time we take a breath of fresh air in public.

I tell this story because more Americans--essentially, young people-- feel they have no control over their destiny. They see endless doom on social media and feel as if their lives are controlled by powerful sources with the money, resources, and time to dictate policy. But that can be overcome. It may not feel like it, but in our democracy, there is no limit to what we can accomplish in defense of the public good.

The tobacco lobby was the big boy in town. They had billions of dollars, lawyers, politicians, and more money than friends and investigators who were ready to squash any threat. Yet I beat them. We beat them. They still lost. They lost to a group of concerned citizens who had fewer resources and far less power than they did, but these citizens had the truth, a noble cause, and resilience.

As we confront the big battles of today, may that spirit of resilience and justice propel us against those hoping we sit on the sidelines. It was a memorable day in my career that changed America, and, like Malcolm Gladwell writes, it was a tipping point. I didn't know it was coming. I thought we were just going to make the flight on airplanes a lot more comfortable for most passengers, but it changed America.

Now, that is not the end of the challenge. Many of those young high school students who no longer smoke tobacco cigarettes are into vaping and other things that are going to be dangerous to them if they become addicted to it. So let's be vigilant, let's be realistic, but let's never give up.

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