Dick Durbin: “this morning I joined many of my colleagues in bidding a formal farewell to our colleague, Senator Bob Bennett, who died…”

“this morning I joined many of my colleagues in bidding a formal farewell to our colleague, Senator Bob Bennett, who died last week. It was great to see Senators from both sides of the aisle at Senator Bennett's viewing and funeral service. It was fitting. Bob Bennett was a proud conservative, he was an old- fashioned conservative, but he understood that the Senate only really works when we talk to each other and reason things out. He was old school. He understood that principled compromise is not a moral or political sin. It is an ideal we should strive for. It is how we solve big problems in America. It is the only way the Senate can work. I served with Bob Bennett for years on the Senate Appropriations Committee. He was an honorable man, a dyed-in-the-wool fiscal conservative. He had an 84-percent lifetime approval rating from the American Conservative Union, but he was a real-world conservative, not an ideologue. No vote demonstrated that more clearly than the vote he cast in 2008 to create the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP. I am not going to forget the day when Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary under President George W. Bush, came to talk to us about the economy. Lehman Brothers had just declared bankruptcy. Secretary Paulson told us that the entire U.S. financial system could collapse within days, maybe hours. He warned that such a collapse of the U.S. financial system would trigger a global economic cataclysm.…”