Top 80 Quotes About Lobbyists
#1. Too often government responds to the whispers of lobbyists before the cries of the people.
Andrew Cuomo
#2. The Bankers' New Clothes makes a simple, powerful argument: that banks need to raise more capital. It is entirely persuasive that the extent of their leverage makes the financial system fragile, and it clearly and patiently demolishes all the counter-arguments made by the banks and their lobbyists.
Diane Coyle
#3. Mostly, the people in "the room" are paid lobbyists representing interests that could afford to pay them. No wonder policy isn't being made that helps smaller, independent musicians or those unaffiliated with a larger entity.
Erin McKeown
#4. I've made it clear that I'm not taking special interest PAC money or accepting donations from lobbyists - ever. I want to represent the interests of the citizens.
Stephen Pagliuca
#5. The White House softball team played the pro-marijuana lobbyists' team and lost 25-3. Still no word yet on which side President Obama played for.
Jay Leno
#6. The court follows elite opinion, not public opinion. And Democratic leaders in Congress and Republican leaders in Congress follow elite opinion as well. It's what I've called "the Washington cartel." It's career politicians in both parties. It is lobbyists and giant corporations.
Ted Cruz
#7. Eliminate lobbyists. Eliminate polls. It might even eliminate Congress. If we can know the will of the people at any time, without filter, without misinterpretation or bastardization, wouldn't it eliminate much of Washington?
Dave Eggers
#8. The need to do something about global warming is obvious. And it's also pretty clear that the public understands the need for change and is ready to embrace it. What is missing is political will in Congress to stand up to the powerful energy companies and their well-paid lobbyists.
Chellie Pingree
#9. If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives.
Will Rogers
#10. Coal and oil lobbyists added fossil fuels to a bill aimed at helping American manufacturers, so they too could claim 'manufacturing' tax deductions.
Bernie Sanders
#11. If people are engaged, eventually the political system responds, despite the money, despite the lobbyists, it still responds.
~ President Obama
Chris Smith
#13. Get involved in an issue that you're passionate about. It almost doesn't matter what it is ... We give too much of our power away, to the professional politicians, to the lobbyists, to cynicism. And our democracy suffers as a result.
Barack Obama
#14. I will never be an insider. I want to be the champion of people who don't have insiders and lobbyists supporting them.
Pat Quinn
#15. These were lobbyists - many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.
Ron Suskind
#16. Mr. President, the buzz saw that your healthcare bill ran into wasn't lobbyists and special interests it was tens of millions of American's who were saying, 'Stop!'
John Boehner
#17. We have organized lobbyists in favor of Israel. You can't open your mouth. I can call the president of the United States anything in the book, but if you say one thing about Israel, and you're off limits.
Helen Thomas
#18. If you look at all the lobbyists in Washington, this is not a democracy. This is ruled by special interest groups. That includes the military, the pharmaceutical industry, the people who produce mechanized debt, GMO foods. We are prisoners.
Deepak Chopra
#19. I'm running for president because I've had enough of the oil barons, the status-quo apologists, the special-interest lobbyists running amok.
Dick Gephardt
#20. The partnership is part of a flourishing industry that pairs plaintiffs' lawyers with state attorneys general to sue companies, a collaboration that has set off a furious competition between trial lawyers and corporate lobbyists to influence these officials.
Anonymous
#22. If we'd had government on [today's] scale in the 1840s, the stagecoaches would have hired lobbyists to get a bill passed that railroads could not travel faster than a horse because it would be an unfair competitive advantage.
Newt Gingrich
#23. We work for the families back home, we do not work for the lobbyists that prowl the halls of the capital building, do not forget who we work for.
Brian Schweitzer
#24. Barack Obama's large contributor was Goldman Sachs - same thing on the Republican side. If you go to both their conventions, you see the same lobbyists paying off both sides so they win either way.
Jesse Ventura
#25. Fairness has not been enhanced by the tax code, but lobbyists have been made rich, politicians have been re-elected, and the economy has been made to suffer.
Jim Bridenstine
#26. Lobbyists didn't descend from a spaceship. They evolved organically from the way we do business.
Christopher Buckley
#27. The blight of office cubes housing lawyers and lobbyists had popped up like chokeweeds in the manicured lawn of the family homestead.
B.V. Lawson
#28. Lobbying is a legitimate profession ... Many congressional spouses act as lobbyists.
Patricia Schroeder
#29. The air is dirty because of the electricity monopolists. They have powerful money lobbyists.
Sam Wyly
#30. In the 1970s, 3 percent of retiring members became lobbyists. Thirty years later, that number has increased by an order of magnitude. Between 1998 and 2004, more than 50 percent of senators and 42 percent of House members made that career transition.
Lawrence Lessig
#31. ...it was easy to forget that Washington was just another glum city of government, like Albany or Sacramento, legislators and lobbyists and bureaucrats and their clerks working and reworking the sodden language of government in order to distribute the spoils.
Ward Just
#32. The crush of lobbyists on Washington and purchase of the media by corporations has created a big business-run government and a worthless press leaving Americans screwed and ill-informed.
Adam McKay
#33. The American people are screaming out saying it's unfair that the wealthiest, the largest corporations who can afford the best attorneys, the best accountants, take advantage of these special tax treatments that the lobbyists have, along with lawmakers, have cooked in the books here.
David Plouffe
#34. The trickle-down experiment that began in the Reagan years failed America's middle class. Sure, the rich are doing great. Giant corporations are doing great. Lobbyists are doing great. But we need an economy where everyone else who works hard gets a shot at doing great!
Elizabeth Warren
#35. Lobbyists really are experts in their fields and know what they are talking about. That's why the government always listens to them as they tell the government what it's doing wrong and what it should be doing instead ...
Gail Collins
#36. America is one of the biggest businesses in the world, and the people who run it can't balance their budget. We need business people in there and lobbyists out of there.
John Paul DeJoria
#37. The judge turned his back towards me, sitting back on his judge's chair, while I was in the witness stand being questioned. The whole courtroom was full of these anarchists, leftists, communists and Jewish lobbyists.
Ernst Zundel
#38. There are good people in the lobbying industry. Lobbyists can serve a very useful purpose.
Kevin Spacey
#39. Global poverty is the product of reversible policy failures overseen by politicians, past and present. The poorest of the poor don't vote in American or European elections. They don't make donations to political parties or hire lobbyists in D.C., London or Canberra.
Hugh Evans
#40. Washington, of course, aside from being one of the most mismanaged, crime-ridden cities on the planet, is a place where 535 federal legislators and about 38,000 lobbyists work at confiscating and redistributing the incomes of the American people.
Charley Reese
#41. They were easy to distinguish from one another, these two groups. The voters wore frowns and invariably seemed lost. The lobbyists were the ones with the Cheshire Cat grins who navigated the halls more confidently than even the newly elected.
Hugh Howey
#42. I have had lobbyists, and I have had some very good ones. They could do anything.
Donald Trump
#43. Lobbyists know that a 0 percent tax rate on capital income is not, in fact, the lowest possible rate. There can be negative tax rates. There can be subsidies. There can be allowances for depreciation. Lobbyists are adaptive creatures.
Joel Achenbach
#44. Our current tax code is one that was designed by and for the benefit of politicians and lobbyists. It punishes achievement and rewards laziness. It punishes the voting blocks unimportant to politicians, and rewards voting blocks who keep them in office.
Neal Boortz
#45. My sense of American politics is that most of our politicians are for sale, whether they are out and out crooked, or simply beholden to corporate interests because they've taken so much money from their lobbyists.
Kam Williams
#46. Many of the earmark request forms are actually filled out by lobbyists and then just turned in by the member's staff to the appropriations committee.
Jeff Flake
#47. Lobbyists in Washington are making six figure salaries selling our government out to the corporate interests and we just sit and smile as if nothing is happening while the poor folks are getting poorer and their pharmaceutical bills rise.
Hal Holbrook
#48. In his first speech as Speaker, Boehner thanked his loved ones - tobacco lobbyists, the oil companies, the CEOs.
Jay Leno
#49. The corporations who invest in lobbyists, it pays in terms of tax loopholes, tax subsidies, all the rest. It pays. Clearly, the money has a big effect.
Mark Shields
#50. The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists.
Eric Schmidt
#51. When there's a vacuum of public input, lobbyists usually fill it. But when there's public input, the people usually win.
Morgan Carroll
#52. Within the narrow confines of Permanent Washington - the journalists, lobbyists, and congressional lifers who are the city's avatars of centrism and continuity - Ford is considered the beau ideal of American leadership.
Timothy Noah
#53. Recently, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry wrote a prescription drug bill that increased their profits and did nothing to help seniors. The result: seniors are stuck with a confusing prescription drug plan that does little to help them with their costs.
Marty Meehan
#54. I represent poor people, I represent working people. I represent senior citizens. I represent family businesses. I represent people who don't have the wherewithal to hire overpriced Washington lobbyists and lawyers. I want to send the powers back to the states and the people.
Paul Broun
#55. The corporations have become our government. They're not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there's no more opening to be heard.
Ralph Nader
#56. political life came to be dominated by a pattern of interest-group politics that the era's political scientists came to call "pluralist," a form of democracy marked more by competition among organizations and lobbyists than by a sense of the public interest.
Ira Katznelson
#57. If you're looking for someone to go to Washington, to go along to get along, to get - to agree with the career politicians in both parties who get in bed with the lobbyists and special interests, then I ain't your guy.
Ted Cruz
#58. I have seen the times when the grassroots has moved the Congress. We listen way more often to our constituents than the lobbyists. And the grassroots are going to have to do it.
John Linder
#59. The studies that show the reason Washington real estate is booming and there are so many lobbyists in town, it does pay.
Mark Shields
#60. Having been a lobbyist myself you can't overstate how easy it is to get things done your way. It's a complicated policy and many lobbyists are trying to wreck amendments as we speak.
Bryony Worthington, Baroness Worthington
#61. Lobbying is not a bad thing. I'm not trying to say that we shouldn't have lobbyists or we shouldn't have lobbying to petition our government. It's in the Constitution, and it's something that should be honorable and good.
Jack Abramoff
#62. The ability of big money to shape perceptions - where you have four anti-climate lobbyists for every single member of the House and Senate - is a big factor.
Al Gore
#64. GM [genetically modified] plants are virtually everywhere in the US food chain, but don't have to be labeled, and aren't. Industry lobbyists intend to keep it that way.
Barbara Kingsolver
#65. Even though the Koch brothers' businesses put 4.4 million people at risk with pollutants, the Kochs have poured millions into lobbyists' coffers and political contributions to ensure their bottom line stays unchanged by the most basic safety precaution.
Robert Greenwald
#66. Young women need to know that abortion rights and abortion access are not presents bestowed or retracted by powerful men (or women) - Presidents, Supreme Court justices, legislators, lobbyists - but freedoms won, as freedom always is, by people struggling on their own behalf.
Katha Pollitt
#67. Air Force officials appear to be more concerned with appeasing the powerful Religious Right lobbyists who have argued against any guidelines that seek to respect and protect the rights of all cadets
not just those adhering to majority religious beliefs.
Barry W. Lynn
#68. The U.S. Senate does not allow legislative provisions to be included in appropriations bills, for much the same reason that most Americans are concerned about earmarks: it creates a slippery slope by which lobbyists and special interest groups can sneak provisions into large, must-pass legislation.
Ron Wyden
#69. Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another.
Robert Reich
#70. Lobbyists have more offices in Washington than the President. You see, the President only tells Congress what they should do. Lobbyists tell'em what they will do.
Will Rogers
#71. Today it is difficult to find leaders who are independent of the forces that have brought us our problems: The Congress, the bureaucracy, the lobbyists, big business, and big labor.
Ronald Reagan
#72. What our economy needs is direct job creation by the government and mortgage-debt relief for stressed consumers. What it very much does not need is a transfer of billions of dollars to corporations that have no intention of hiring anyone except more lobbyists.
Paul Krugman
#73. Some issues lend themselves to grassroots campaigns - homeschooling works well - but others require contrivance and connivance to whip up support. Often, lobbyists will hire vendors to dispatch blast emails and robocalls in the hopes of bombarding Congressional offices with citizen fury.
Jack Abramoff
#74. After all, they (the pro-vaccine lobbyists) say to themselves, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. But the eggs being broken are small, helpless, and innocent babies, while the omelette is being enjoyed by the pediatricians and vaccine manufacturers.
Harris L Coulter
#75. Real lobbying reform must end the practice of corporate lobbyists writing our laws.
Marty Meehan
#76. Lobbyist influence comes from access, not money.
Barack Obama
#77. If you can't drink a lobbyist's whiskey, take his money, sleep with his women and still vote against him in the morning, you don't belong in politics.
Brian Redman
#78. Under a system in which no single question is submitted to the electorate for direct decision, an ardent minority for or against a particular measure may often count for more than an apathetic majority.
Patrick, Baron Devlin
#79. Jack Abramoff is going to testify against some of the other weasels in Congress. A lobbyist testifying against congressmen? How many Bibles are going to burst into flames in that courtroom?
Jay Leno
#80. Alexi Giannoulias' top aide was a longtime BP lobbyist.
Mark Kirk
