I spent almost a decade covering the United States Senate. So, believe me when I tell you that I do not want to be a United States senator. But two weeks into the Trump administration β which is just as lawless, destructive, and inhumane as anyone who lived through the last one could have imagined β it is clear that Democrats on Capitol Hill are failing so spectacularly to confront a constitutional crisis which their own political incompetence helped create that I am willing to channel the anger coursing through my body and finally put my country before my own personal well-being.
Today, it brings me no pleasure to announce that I am launching an exploratory committee for a Senate run to replace the senior senator from my home state, Dick Durbin. There is very little entailed; anyone can do it. Democrats are deeply, historically unpopular right now , with a 57 percent unfavorability rating. How did it come to this? Democrats have built their entire party structure on polite deference, seniority, and chasing bipartisanship as an outcome, as opposed to elevating the most talented and passionate politicians into roles in which they can make impact or articulating, defending, and expanding the role of what government can do to improve the lives of others.
But this deference also has poisoned our politics in corrosive ways, with institutional seniority locking in apathy and entitlement among Democratic leaders. The headline here is that a seniority-first approach has greatly contributed to Democrats conceding their own agency in setting the terms of political discourse.
Republicans realized long ago they could leverage House and Senate committees, as well as the floor of both chambers, to pull mainstream discourse in their direction as well as generate content to feed the machine of their base. This all contributed to a broad idea that the civil service was a faceless bureaucracy, and the media, seeing no objections being raised, helped to drive that point home. That keeping the lights on was the ceiling and not the floor. Of course, this is and always has been wrong.
That the system might be better off being burnt to the ground is an offshoot of the consensus that Democrats helped usher into being by attempting to do bipartisanship at any cost. Naturally, that brings me to Senator Dick Durbin. Durbin is 80 years old, up for reelection in , has not yet announced whether he will pursue reelection, and has not conveyed passion for a single issue since , when he went on a diatribe on the House floor in defense of wooden bats in baseball.
