Profile in Cowardice: Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Il.)

For years, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) has highlighted a Profile in Courage (PIC) at the end of each month. This figure usually rises above the fray of partisan politics and works diligently to make life better for taxpayers and consumers. Occasionally, though, a politician goes the other way and commits to terrible policies that fuel partisanship and would make everyone worse off. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is one such figure, showing disregard for taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars and waging war on families’ access to credit. For consistently letting the American people down and raising costs across the country, Sen. Durbin is a Profile in Cowardice.

Nowhere is this cowardice clearer than Sen. Durbin’s unapologetic embrace of earmarks. Despite  policymakers railing against “pork-barrel spending” and ostensibly banning earmarks in 2011, earmarks continued to quietly be tucked into massive spending bills. During the congressional tug-of-war over allowing earmarks, Sen. Durbin disturbingly claimed, “There is full disclosure in my office of every single request for an appropriation. We then ask those who have made the requests to have a full disclaimer of their involvement in the appropriation, so it’s there for the public record. This kind of transparency is virtually unprecedented.”

But, as former Cato Institute senior fellow Jim Harper pointed out at the time, “Senator Durbin puts his request disclosures out as scanned PDFs. Someone on his staff takes a letter and puts it on a scanner, making a PDF document of the image. Then the staffer posts that image on the senator’s web site. It’s totally useless if you want to use the data for anything. Notably, Senator Durbin doesn’t even include the addresses of his earmark recipients.” And now that earmarks are (officially) back and allowed again, Sen. Durbin has been having a field day on taxpayers’ dime. Since earmarks returned in 2021, Sen. Durbin stuffed the following goodies into spending bills: $10.2 million for unnecessary new military installations, $8.3 million for costly electric buses, and $800,000 for a “violence interruption” organization called the Metropolitan Peace Academy (despite no evidence showing its effectiveness).

In addition to his troubling track record with earmarks, Sen. Durbin has made it his mission to compromise families’ access to debit and credit cards. The lawmaker inserted an amendment into the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that arbitrarily capped debit interchange fees—or charges paid by merchants to card-issuing banks for processing transactions. Ranging from rampant fraud to increases in the cost of everyday banking services, this led to an array of unintended consequences. Meanwhile, the vast majority of merchants—who the “Durbin Amendment” was designed to help—did not report lower costs or debt. One might think this would have taught Sen. Durbin the folly of the government micromanaging the economy. One would be wrong.

Sen. Durbin continues to push for the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA), which would mandate that card issuers allow merchants to use more payment networks in processing credit card transactions. If enacted, this reckless proposal—which aims to reduce interchange fees paid by merchants—would be the end of credit card rewards for millions of Americans. As NerdWallet writers Sara Rathner and Kenley Young note, “If you’re a committed credit card rewards optimizer sitting on a pile of points and miles, the possibility that the Credit Card Competition Act would pass is likely making you sweat. A major concern is that with reduced income from [interchange] fees, credit card issuers will cut back on their rewards programs and partnerships with airline loyalty programs.”

Currently, there are more than 31 million U.S. airline credit cardholders—and about 200 million Americans who benefit from credit card rewards. An astounding 15 million domestic trips were awarded and earned through airline credit card points in 2024. The CCCA would make earning points (and free trips) a thing of the past, to the detriment of travelers across the country. The legislation would also mean fewer security features available to credit card consumers because issuers would have less of an incentive to invest in payment network infrastructure. Yet Sen. Durbin marches on, shamelessly trying to plug the CCCA into completely unrelated legislation.

Lawmakers will never be right all the time. When they make a mistake, they should aim to learn from their failures and strive to do better. Unfortunately, Sen. Durbin has been all-too eager to tax and regulate households without an iota of hesitation or regret. For this profound failing, Sen. Durbin is a Profile in Cowardice.