On Tuesday, The Epoch Times reported that Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Tuesday blocked legislation in the Senate that would have strengthened penalties for child porn possession, saying the bill “doesn’t reflect the realities of today.”

What realities of today is he talking about?

The article notes:

The legislation—put forward by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and cosponsored by Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.)—comes after weeks of heated debate over Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s track record in sentencing child porn offenders.

After one such debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee, Durbin, who chairs the committee, said that the Senate had been derelict in its duty to update child porn law, which was originally designed to deal with physical images rather than digital ones.

“I hope you will agree we all want to do everything within our power to lessen incidents of child pornography and exploitation,” Durbin said last week. “I want to tell you, Congress doesn’t have clean hands. We haven’t touched this now for 15, 16, or 17 years.”

Durbin added that Congress had shown “inattention and unwillingness to tackle an extremely controversial issue.”

“I don’t know if you’ve introduced a bill to change this—I’ll be looking for it,” Durbin told Hawley. “If we’re going to tackle it, we should.”

Referencing that interaction, Hawley said on the Senate floor Tuesday: “I agree 100 percent. I agree we should tackle it, this is the time to tackle it, and I’m here to do that today.”

In 2003, Congress passed legislation instituting mandatory minimum sentencing for child porn offenders. In a controversial decision, the Supreme Court in United States v. Booker struck down the mandatory minimum laws, which bind judges’ hands, as unconstitutional.

This is not the time to be ‘looking at it”–this is the time to do something about it.