Laughter Breaks Out As Ted Cruz, John Kennedy Pay Respects To Retiring Dick Durbin

Forbes Breaking News

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.

Transcript

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.

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