Dick Durbin has seen his share of epic political battles as Illinois’ senior lawmaker in Washington. So he surely isn’t surprised at the slings and arrows coming his way from fellow Democrats after being one of eight Democratic senators to vote to reopen the government on terms most in his party say constitute capitulation to the detested Donald Trump. But we suspect he is surprised by the amount of poisonous rhetoric.

We’re under no illusions about why Durbin took the position he did. He is retiring at the end of his term in 2027, and the reality of the dealmaking that just transpired among Democrats in the Senate meant that serving the American people and getting the government reopened meant being willing to take a fall.

Many Democratic senators (not all) concluded the longest government shutdown in history had gone on long enough and they needed to accept what GOP Majority Leader John Thune was offering. Those who are retiring or who recently won reelection surely were asked to put their names in the yes column, while plenty of those who voted no and publicly expressed their displeasure no doubt secretly were relieved.

Still, it’s quite something to see a man who’s done so much for Illinois Democrats — indeed for the state at large — endure such opprobrium from his own side. Gov. JB Pritzker said the deal Durbin supported was nothing more than an “empty promise.” U.S. Rep. Sean Casten, a Democrat who represents much of the west suburbs, characterized it as a “liar convincing a sucker.” Durbin being in the latter category, presumably.

Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton, whom Pritzker has endorsed to succeed Durbin, called the agreement “a complete betrayal of the American people.” (Her opponents in the primary, U.S. Reps. Robin Kelly and Raja Krishnamoorthi, also opposed the bill to end the shutdown.) The classier Stratton move would have been to support the man whose early support of her current boss helped cement his rise.

On the Senate floor, Durbin acknowledged the friendly fire. But, he said he could “not accept a strategy which wages political battles at the expense of my neighbor’s paycheck or the food for his children.”

We understand the political dynamic at work here and believe Durbin does too. He just has more experience, and more class, than some of those who criticized him.

And once the “Very Online Democrats,” as the political strategists say, move on, don’t be surprised if pragmatists in the party look back on the terms they obtained more favorably than they do today. Republicans agreed to hire back all the federal workers the Trump administration laid off during the shutdown, and they agreed to bar the administration from any more job cuts through Jan. 30, when both parties again will need to vote to keep the government running.

Appropriations bills negotiated to fully fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefits and veterans programs for the year ending next Sept. 30 also are part of the deal. Will Durbin get any thanks from those who agonized over Trump’s fight to deny SNAP recipients benefits while the shutdown persisted? He should.

And Democrats will be allowed next month to lead a Senate debate and force a vote over extension of expired Affordable Care Act subsidies at the heart of substantial health insurance cost spikes for millions of Americans beginning next year. GOP leaders have publicly acknowledged they need to do something about the issue, and they have ceded the floor to Democrats in the Senate to negotiate a deal, if one can be reached.

An angry Democratic base isn’t satisfied by that sort of inside baseball, but it really is an extraordinary concession for the majority party in the Senate to yield control of the floor to the minority for any reason. If nothing comes of the debate, Democrats will have a potent issue on which to campaign for elections occurring less than a year from now.

In the context of past governmental shutdowns, which have yielded precisely nothing for the party doing the shutting down, these concessions can be interpreted at minimum as less than a loss. We’d characterize it as a win, albeit a modest one.

The above notwithstanding, please don’t get us wrong. We’d like nothing more than to see shutdown politics go the way of the dinosaurs and see a commitment to regular order become the norm. This sort of hyperpartisanship wasn’t how the framers envisioned our polity functioning.

Durbin is an institutionalist to his core and believer in the sort of Senate that could plausibly claim to live up to its reputation as the world’s greatest deliberative body. Most of his fellow Democrats seem to believe those days are forever gone.

They won’t have Dick Durbin to frustrate them for much longer. In the meantime, he at least has us joining him in his hope that the Senate finds its way again and that our country can relearn how to debate — and compromise on — the most urgent issues of the day.

___

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.